Well, belated birthday. Our first post was actually a year ago last Saturday (Nov 4). For GANB’s one year birthday we decided to do a of things we’ve been putting off.
But first, how’d we get started? Glad you asked.
Starting off as an Internet Explorer hater site, the idea was to take part in the Firefox revolution by giving web developers the power. In a sense we wanted all web developers to join together and redirect any IE users to GetANewBrowser.com (which you can with a tad of javascript). Then on this page we would give instructions for uninstalling IE and downloading a new browser (officially supported Opera and Firefox). We gave news (via aggregated RSS feed) from the blogosphere about why you should not be using IE. It was a fun experiment that never really made any ground. View Version 1.
Once TJ and I decided to blog we thought – ‘What a better name than Get A New Browser?’ to write about web development and design. So we jumped on Blogger and off we went. The majority of posts were about web development and design. I had also started blogging on my personal website about business and technology. We slowly amassed some readership which started to dwarf my own site’s. So I thought why not move my business and technology articles over to GANB where there’s already an audience? Once I did this our readership started to steadily grow.
Time for a new design. The original design was great but we quickly grew out of it and it lacked functionality. I was fed up with trying to hack together blogger so we decided to go simpler, but remain on blogger.
The next design was based of Signal Vs Noise in a sense that we wanted the design as simple as possible but we quickly grew out that as well as Blogger was just not accomplishing what we needed it to.
So TJ wanted a new design and I wanted a new platorm – And the Spring 2006 CSS Reboot offered us a great chance to come up with a great new design and gain traffic. So TJ went to work on this gorgeous design that eminated. I was sick of Blogger and wanted more functionality and control over the platform that we were using. The answer? WordPress. So I went to work on learning to be a wordpress hacker.
It did not take long after reboot and a bit of our own kind of advertising to need to move to a real server that is not located in my garage (don’t worry, we still got plenty of sites running out there). And for the last six months we have been concentrating on our writing in an effort to provide better content for our growing readership.
What did we accomplish over the last year?
- ~ 220 Subscribers
- 302 Posts
- 254 Comments
- ~ 3000 Spam Comments
- Technorati Rank ~ 45,000
- Lots and Lots of Networking
So, for GANB’s birthday we decided to do some updates to enhance the user experience and provide more organization focusing on content. When TJ first designed this he described it as having a ‘magazine feel’. I think with the recent updates the functionality has finally met the design potential.
So what’s new? To start we claened up some of the design focusing on organization, content, and usability.
We started to embrace the power of categories as an organizational mechanism rather than a tagging system. Using it for tagging got out of hand and became a mess. It provided no value to our users. Using them as navigation to sub-topics did make a lot of sense. Now our users could find the content we create that is important to them.
- Cleaned up categories to focus on main topics allowing for clearer paths for users
- Created category pages with lists of posts and category descriptions
- We added RSS feeds to each category. We know a lot of you may just read our takes on design and not my constant rants about Microsoft and Google. Now you can do that.
We added related posts after each post, before the comments. We put this there because it gives you an easy way to find out what we have written that’s related to a specific topic your interested in.
And we added a more convenient way to subscribe to our content by adding a subscription page with a bunch of RSS chicklets and an email subscription option using FeedBlitz. Now there’s no reason for you not to subscribe.
Next we thought GANB was getting lonely and needed a sister. We’ve wanted a music / entertainment blog for awhile since we are both avid music fans. So we came up with TwoOhNine and enlisted the help of our good friend and music afficianado Cam (who I will see tomorrow in Seattle!) to lend us a hand writing.
So thanks for reading and stick around because we have a lot of treats coming this year. Enjoy!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Happy Birthday. :-)
Thank you!
Happy Birthday – a bit belated but sincere!
It was great to read your review of how you got to where you are at.
Blogging is not some sort of controlled entry into the blogosphere. You just hit the atmosphere and adjust as fast as you can….and hope you don’t burn to a cinder.
Congrats Andy!
HAHA wow 5 years… we've know each other a long time then
We have been out of school for some time now… We're getting old.
indeed we are… yikes oh yikes
{ 1 trackback }