Please allow me to welcome you to JoshPremuda.com version 2.0. I decided this site needed a new feel, so I re-branded the whole site. I was never really happy with the previous look and hadn’t finished what I had planned – I’m sure you could tell – so I scrapped it all. While I won’t say it’s complete (it’s always a work-in-progress), I will say that the majority of the site is complete and updated. For further detail into things, read on. WARNING: it’s long, but I’m proud of my site, so please read it.

SUBSCRIBE
I’ve made it much easier to subscribe to www.joshpremuda.com. There are three ways (at this point) you can get your JP fix: (i) visit www.joshpremuda.com, (ii) subscribe via RSS and/or, (iii) subscribe via Email. You pick. I just want you subscribed, please. And, as added motivation, I’m planning on deleting my Facebook account, so that’s one less way for you to stay up-to-date with me.

By the way, I’ve subscribed to the email version of this site and it’s a rather cool way to take in my content. One email shows up with the days posts. You get to see it in your inbox and it’s shows how my mind progressed (or digressed) that day.

SPONSOR
It’s much easier to sponsor me. I’m cheap and I like to barter; I really just want this site to pay for itself, so if you have something you’re interested in promoting, contact me and we can work out an arrangement. You get your ad above the fold, a couple of tweets and likely a post or two, so it really works out to your advantage. First sponsor is my company, CurrentBlend (I’m in the process of updating that site as I type this – more on that later).

STYLE
The most obvious change is the color palate. I’ve always enjoyed the color orange and figured why not use that here. I wear an orange watch band daily and apparently it has some pretty cool meanings (I’m not sure that’s the right word, but you catch my drift). All hyperlinks should appear as orange, so anytime you click one of those, you’re going to a new page. Also, those little orange rectangles on the main page (above the posts) are the permalinks, so click those (or the link called “Comments”) if you want to comment or read more of the comments. And, the big orange rectangle will always take you back to the homepage. So, I guess you can say now that orange is my new black (although I don’t really like black outside of a tuxedo or athletic gear, but that’s a completely different story).

Also changed is the font choices. I went with Helvetica since I think it’s much easier to read, and it’s tons prettier. Titles are Palatino (and are typically hyperlinks – but they’re grey, not orange like all other hyperlinks; I misspoke earlier – so they should take you somewhere should you click on them).

ORGANIZATION
I wouldn’t say I reorganized everything, but I did make some changes to the presentation. I’ve added a “Comments” counter on the main page along with a more visible tagging display. This way I hope you begin to comment more and use the tags to explore other posts that are related.

I’ve updated the About, Archive, Contact and Subscribe pages and have plans to add a few more pages (e.g. Beau, Sponsor, and Reviews to name three).

There are a few other items I’ll leave up to you to find and I will also be rolling out some other pages and such (updated footer, contact page, random post function, twitter implementation, archive re-org), but will let you know as those happen.

COMMENTS
I’ve gone with Disqus to control comments and I’ve made the comment link much more prominent on the main page as I’d like to encourage discussion. The fun part for me of posting all this information is the responses I get in return. Rather than on Facebook where it’s a limited conversation, I’d prefer to have all the discussion take place here on this site.

Using Disqus will allow you to subscribe to comments via email so you can stay up on the discussion. So, let’s get the conversation going. Having said that, you can always send me an email: joshpremuda AT gmail DOT com.

Tags: currentblend, josh premuda, joshpremuda.com

JoshPremuda.com v2.0 was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 14:07 and is filed in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.