Today we finally launched our revamped marketing [m.o.] content website. It’s called Process, Tips and Strategy for Business Marketers. 

The new website contains all of the previous marketing how-to articles from our former Marketing Tips from the Trenches blog, and detail about the marketing process. We’ll post new how-to articles weekly, and the site is free. Grab the feed here if you’re interested. 

We also added our first group of founding distributors’ profiles under the Consultants section. This advertising is one component of our Certified Distributor program. Since we no longer offer marketing services and focus solely on our products, we want to direct inbound leads to our partners, who have access to our tools (as well as their own expertise). 

Our Website Revamp 

Speaking of partners, thanks to Identity Studios for the new marketing [m.o.] site design.  They also did this site. They’re a young creative agency that’s growing rapidly and performing great work!

Since we’re finishing up a new article about the steps of a website content revamp, I thought I’d share more information about the marketing [m.o.] update. 

Our old site had a custom content-manager built in. It seemed like a good idea in 2006, but we wanted a more widely-accepted platform with easy customization and support, that’s very SEO friendly. We decided on WordPress, and chose to modify the Thesis theme. 

We encountered numerous challenges with Google while importing our existing blog and moving our content into WordPress, without losing links or PageRank. It turns out Google indexed well over 1,000 pages from our old site, because of the different subdomains we had created for the back-end of our application. Then, we had some problems with a plug-in scrambling our sitemap with each update, so Google Webmaster would show a growing list of 404 errors with each new crawl. After this experience, I think we’ll stay away from subdomains and sitemap plug-ins in the future. Not fun. Lesson learned. 

The good part is that updating content in WordPress is a breeze (once it’s setup properly). Login, cut & paste and viola–new pages! In fact, we’re using WordPress for this blog. Once we fix our image loader, we’ll add some photos to spice up our posts.

Upcoming Consulting M.O. v3.0 

Now that this project is complete, we can shift our focus to our upcoming new application. We started coding right before Thanksgiving, after spending three months working through specifications and requirements. The new version will shift from a static web app to a content platform, making it easier for our users and partners to modify our content, access the new content we’re producing, and create and store their own.

More to come …