Website Makeover

Hello All!

I have been silent the last week or so as I have been on a rollercoaster ride revamping my site. And truth be told, there is still a lot more work to be done, but at least the new theme (visual layout) is now up and running and I can get back to posting regularly.

There are still a lot of issues being worked on so please do bear with me as I work out the kinks. As a visual person, I wanted to make this go live to help see the kinks as doing so from constantly some backend behind-the-scenes scenario was too confusing for me. Mainly, I am doing my best to optimize the mobile side of things as most of you use that form of technology more so than your computers these days. But it might be another few weeks before I have that tightly knit.

The main reason for the revamp was for easy access to my 2000 plus posts that I felt just got easily lost in my old site as the search function was not that great at filtering through my work. And I have written so many great articles over the last 10 years, that I really want them to be easily found so that great knowledge can be shared. I know that in more recent times, I write less educational, long posts and the reality is because I have written them all already and am not crazy about re-writing the same thing a million times over. And therefore, I wanted that the new readers to The Shoe Snob Blog could easily find/access a post that I wrote 5 years ago that had all of the information that they were looking for wrapped up in one post. And the last blog format, did not easily allow for that.

So what’s new?

A lot of the inspiration to the new look, truth be told, came from Simon Crompton’s Permanent Style who had a great layout design for this type of blog with advertising on the side. It made sense to create something similar as it offered an ‘easy-to-find’ set up on the landing page. On top of that, we have created a ‘Categories’ section on the menu bar that allows for one to easily find posts based on common themes/categories within the shoe industry. This is a work in progress though as it needs to be tightened up but also added to. Another work in progress section is the ‘Brands’ part of the menu bar which will be a page that you can go to and search all of the posts ever written by brand name. Much like a search function tool but all in one page easily accessed and used through one click of a link.

Utilizing the landing page is the real new key to finding posts as I feel like I added what most people come to blogs to find, there on the landing page from ‘Shoe Care’ to ‘Unboxing Video’s to ‘Product Review’s’ and finally ‘Popular Articles.’ These sections alone make up most of the readership on the site so I wanted to make them easily accessible for all of you.

There are still some issues being worked out, as mentioned before so please do bear with me as I work on those. One issue that occurred was that some of you who are newsletter subscribers received a plethora of old emails from me last night. There was an issue with the newsletter send out not showing the thumbnail images and I am unsure what happened as a developer is working to resolve it but some glitch apparently sent some of you a ton of emails. I apologize for that. Please just delete them.

As I am just one man who cannot do/see/improve everything, I am happy to take your advice if you see errors/discrepancies/issues with the site. I am going to do my best to constantly look for these things and fix them but as time is always an issue for an entrepreneur, I might miss some. Please do not hesitate to reach out and let me know of them. It will actually help me.

Thank you as always for your support and I hope that this new layout helps many of you find old articles with new information for you that you might have previously missed.

-Justin FitzPatrick