The Blog Studio

Finally, after months of work, I am very pleased to unveil The Blog Studio’s new website!

Big thanks to everyone here on the team for helping make this live. A huge shout of thanks is also due to all my twitter friends for your insight and advice.

We had a couple of concrete goals with this redesign. The web and blog design market has matured greatly over the past few years, and our old site didn’t reflect the quality of work we’re doing today. We needed to a better job of showing the range of our capabilities, and wanted to highlight the full-service nature of our studio. Visually, the new site is a bold departure from its previous iterations. Under the hood the whole code base was rewritten and optimized. We actually took our own advice, and built a site that’s easy to update and maintain.

Just this morning, we shot and edited a new introduction video. We’re using Vimeo, and have embedded the movie right on the home page. Check it out!

I’ve got a ton to say about this, but deadlines are pressing, so off I must go. If you’re reading this in a feed reader, please come on over and check out the new design.

I just realized The Blog Studio is 3 and a half. We’re officially in the cute stage; we’re out of our terrible twos, and love to hug. Just thought you should know.

I just added a bunch of updates to the work section. Like the coming redesign of theblogstudio.com, this update was long overdue. It’s really interesting to me to hear which bits of work people prefer. I’m never sure what to include in the portfolio. Some of the designs I’m less crazy about are other people’s favorites. We’ll be launching some quite a few bits of major work over the next couple of weeks, so look for the work section to get another update soon.

It’s because of all that work that this site hasn’t been updated yet. The redesign itself is close to complete. It takes a biiiig step away from the current look and feel, and introduces our new branding. While we deeply love The Blog Studio name, it doesn’t fully convey the scope of the work we do. The purpose of this rebranding and site redesign is to address just that point.

Here’s a sneak peek:

The thing about blogging, is the longer you go without doing it, the harder it is to get started again.

I’m mid-way through a long overdue redesign of this site, and way overdue on a number of important announcement. I’ve got so much important stuff to share, that I don’t have the time to sit down and write a proper post.

The good news is that my time is short because I’ve been actually taking weekends and evenings off to spend with my family. Holidays are the best. We’re all taking time off this summer, meaning there’s lots to do when we are in the office.

Bottom line is that we’re busy working with some really amazing people. I’m taking my time with redesigning this site and having some fun. I hope the end result will be worth the wait!

Being that this is a family friendly website, I don’t have the words to publicly describe the past 24 hours. To say it’s been a bit stressful would be an understatement.

In short, a couple of days ago, our server, hosted at serverbeach.com started to act flaky. Over three or four days, site performance slowed to a crawl, then finally gave up the ghost yesterday. We made a couple of requests to repair or replace the failing hard drive. These were never directly answered, instead we were told that the server had been restarted and appeared to be working. That was acceptable after it stopped once. Even after it stopped twice. But after the 4th restart the hosting company should have pulled the obviously faulty drive.

The drive was finally yanked yesterday. It took almost 24 hours for a new drive to be installed and properly configured. Every request for help would result in a 2 to 4 hour wait for a response. In 80% of the cases, the information in the responses was either incorrect or incomplete. We’d do as instructed, discover it didn’t work, then have to wait for another 2 to 4 hours for the original request to be fixed. The errors involved things like not plugging in the drive correctly, not installing the control panel software, and overwriting a bunch of files. These are very basic problems that would have been easily avoided if the tech people had taken a moment to test their work.

This didn’t just affect theblogstudio.com, but a number of our friends and client’s sites as well. To those folks I deeply apologize.

We’ve changed server companies, and so far are very impressed with mosso.com. Not only are they literally half the cost of serverbeach, they have actual human beings in tech support you can reach 24/7.

That’s it for now. I’ve got a couple of days worth of work to catch up on, and a beer somewhere calling my name…

Peter