A New Look for my Little Blog Empire

It's completely coincidental that I finished the first major stage of my blog redesign strategy late last night (around 3:30 AM). I wasn't gunning for a new year/new look event, it just happened that way. Kinda fun! (I also just realized this is my 300th post!)

Coincidence aside, if you're reading this in RSS, click through to check out the all-new, way better design that I've used to bring all my various blogs into one, nearly seamless empire. I think it's pretty groovy, actually.

There are currently four separate blogs that pertain to my life and business in the arts:

• The studio blog, which you're reading now, was my first foray into blogging way back when. This is where I write about ideas and thoughts on art, design, business, marketing, etc. as well as where I post news and occasional personal stuff.
• The ArtBuzz blog started as an experiment in permission marketing crossed with an idea I had about rewarding existing customers for sales of art. It was kind of an early experiment in social sharing. ArtBuzz didn't really work out the way I had originally planned, but it became the place where I post all the work that is currently available for sale. A blog-based art gallery.
  
• The Portfolio blog is brand spanking new. It used to be a static website, but I converted it to a blog a couple months ago. I'm looking forward in a big way to being able to keep it up to date more easily than I could when all the pages were hand-coded in HTML and uploaded via a command line interface. Pretty much all the art I've done in the last five or six years is there.
• I Got No Zen is where I've slowly been posting all the best work I did back when I was primarily a writer and poet. Currently there are three books of poems, and various bits of fiction and prose. I've still got some material I'd like to add (at some point) but this is more of a static collection of work than a blog which gets constantly updated.

After spending so much of my energy this year writing hacks for the TypePad Hacks blog, it was really kind of embarrassing how little attention I had paid to my own sites. I spent the last couple weeks coming up with a template and redesign that could wrap all four sites into one, while retaining a slightly different feel for each area. I'm pretty happy with it.

Some of the new features include permalinked titles, a drop-down menu at the top (it's a wee bit slow to work yet and seems to work best if moused over from the bottom), a simplified design for the footers of posts, an edit button so I can easily update older posts when needed and so on. I'm not really done playing with ideas, but I think the overall design is something I'll be able to live happily with for quite a while.

Let me know what you think!