That Was Then, This Is Now: Welcome to the New Copyblogger Website

Welcome!

Things may look a little different since the last time you stopped by our place.

We've been working as a team to build a new home for our Copyblogger content since last year.

Today is open house day, so come on in and I'll give you a tour.

Why did we redesign Copyblogger?

I'll be the first to admit it: redesigning Copyblogger was a little like turning in your perfectly good late-model car, which is in excellent condition (and getting great mileage), for something new, because it's … shinier?

In other words, why redesign a site that already looked great?

In our case, our business has changed pretty dramatically since Copyblogger was last redesigned back in 2013.

In those days, the Copyblogger website was the single hub that served as a jumping off point for everything we did as a company — our educational products, our software, our original podcast.

Today, our company offers a wide variety of products and services, and this site is no longer the single hub for all of them. We now have a group of sites, and each serves a different audience.

What do we do today? At Rainmaker Digital, we:

• Are the creators of the Rainmaker Platform, an all-in-one website solution for online marketing and sales
• Are the company behind StudioPress, creator of the industry-leading Genesis Framework and StudioPress premium WordPress themes
• Offer Rainmaker.FM, our podcast network for digital marketing, sales, and business advice
• Have founded the Digital Commerce Institute, which features Digital Commerce Academy for digital business training, and the Digital Commerce Summit — our live event in Denver (coming this October)

And of course, we have Copyblogger.

On this site, we teach you how to master content marketing (notice the new tagline on the top left of the site).

Here at Copyblogger, we bring you our Authority advanced content marketing training program. We train and certify content marketers with our Certified Content Marketer program.

Content marketing is our main focus. It drives what we create and keeps us dreaming up new ways to teach, share, and guide you as you develop your content marketing chops.

The old site didn't fit what Copyblogger is today, so it was time for a change.

What has changed on Copyblogger?

The first change we made happened late last year. We separated our stream of Copyblogger posts from the stream of audio content published on Rainmaker.FM.

Why?

Because we know people have a strong preference to read their content or listen to their content, but generally not both at once in the same place.

So now, Articles have a tab and Audio has a separate tab. To see and listen to the latest Rainmaker.FM episodes, visit the Audio tab.

Learn more about what interests you most with our new mini courses

Our new site features four "mini courses" you can sign up for.

We curated the best content from the Copyblogger archives and put together a series of emails that will deliver that content to you over time, so you can read, absorb, and learn from it.

Sign up in the sidebar or below any post on the site.

New appearance

The new design features a streamlined navigation menu, an easy-on-the eyes serif font for body text, and a clear, clean appearance thanks to the design wizardry of Lead Designer Lauren Mancke.

We were aiming for a magazine-like feel for this site redesign, and thanks to Lauren and our expert developers, we got it.

Our updated home page highlights our products, our customers, and our free education in a new and innovative way. Take a look.

What are those strange fields at the end of this post?

You may notice an unfamiliar section directly below this post. That's right: comments are back on Copyblogger.

If you've been in our community for any length of time, you know we run a lot of experiments around here and enjoy sharing our results with you.

On a site this size, moderating comments took an enormous amount of time and energy — time and energy we preferred to devote to:

• Building and launching the Rainmaker Platform
• Launching Rainmaker.FM, our podcast network
• Creating and inviting you to join our newest educational program, DigitalCommerce.com

That's just a taste of what we've done as a company in the time since we closed comments on the blog.

But that was then, and this is now.

Bringing back comments was important to me personally. As a Copyblogger guest writer, one of my favorite things about writing for this site was interacting in the comment section at the bottom of my posts. And now, as the editorial team lead, I've missed the immediate feedback comments provide.

So, we're bringing comments back. But this is still a huge site with a big audience that gets a lot of traffic.

And we haven't forgotten that moderating and responding to comments can soak up all your creative energy if you don't have healthy boundaries around them (like a Comment Policy, for starters).

That's why in this current experiment with comments, we're going to keep them open for only seven days after publication.

Want to join the discussion? You have a full week to do so. Seven days after an article is published, its comments will close.

Tell us what you think in the comments

It brings me great joy to be able to invite you to tell us what you think of the Copyblogger redesign in the comments.

Let us know your thoughts! We can't wait to hear them.

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