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Thursday, August 18, 2005

Web Site Overhaul

I have a confession to make. When I first launched the web site for SOHO It Goes, January 2003, it was a very slap dash, unplanned affair. Having just come through the dot com disaster, job hunted for a year, got a job and was fired because the other secretaries "hated me" (boo hoo), I was freaking out and decided to throw everything I had into a new business. I launched the site within a week - zip, bam, boom - off to find new clients. Two and a half years later, I've come to regret about 90% of my choices in the architecture of the site. For one thing - being in a hurry, I threw it together without a template or set of styles. For another, I never in my wildest dreams imagined radio shows, blogs, huge directories of free articles, or info products for sale!

I grew, it grew, I wrote, it grew, and after a while, my short sitedness caught up with me. So, last week, I decided to redo every page with a new navigation menu, new information architecture and a better plan for the future. To my utter disbelief, I discovered that I had put somewhere in the realm of 150+ pages of content on my web site in 2.5 years. That's conservative - and its not counting blog postings. Good grief!

Anyway - after staying up nearly all night every night this week (because client work takes up much of my days), I finally put it all online tonite. My goals were to:

* Keep the same basic look - nothing really wrong with the collage and it gets compliments
* Design a new, more updated navigation for the vast amount of free resources and information I've written
* Put the whole dang blasted thing in templates with new and improved style sheet
* Move the blog, info products and my other two web businesses to the top so people can find out about them
* Reduce content in some areas, add other things like "solutions" to make it clearer who I work with and what I do for them

I'm sure I'll be working out the kinks and finding 'gotchas' for another week but, back and neck aching, I think I've done it.

So check out the new SOHO It Goes (hit Refresh in your browser if it looks screwy - IE is caching old pages big time!) and let me know what you think!