The 14th Colony Transfer Project
by Randall McCarley
October 16th, 2007
Enough complaining about what didn’t work, here’s the process I went through to relaunch 14th Colony into the cleaner, more professional (and already looking more profitable) website you see before you.
First, some background…
When 14thC was first launched I was putting out a new layout every 3 months or so. This was reactive to the growth and new directions for the site. When 14thC.com was first launched it was as a notebook for my own research and ideas about search engine optimization. The initial site was made of static HTML pages. As the amount of content grew this became insane to keep updated so I changed things to PHP to use includes for the basic site structure and then hacked the .htaccess to keep the page URLs the same (with .html at the end instead of .php) for the search engines.
This was ok for a while but then I added the blog. The blog was in a separate directory. I was never really satisfied with this as I didn’t really have a home page for the site, instead just pulling the RSS feed and stuffing some content around it.
By the time I added some new pages like Services and the Interviews things were getting a bit cluttered. Microsoft launched a new version of Internet Explorer that inexplicably broke the header design for just the blog… even though the code was the same as the rest of the site.
“I’ll fix that soon,” I told myself, busy with client work.
Finally the day came where I was meeting with a client and explaining what a blog is and how it works. I brought up my own site to show him the Dashboard and how the content displayed. Looking at the site with a client embarrassed me. Here was hundreds of pages about how a website should work but the usability was poor. I had learned a lot about SEO - and posted about it - that was not in practice on my own site.
I was disgusted with myself for letting things go so far. I repeatedly apologized for the site explaining that the new design was “coming soon” in blog and forum posts.
At the same time I was building Linker’s Union where a lot of the content overlapped. It was getting difficult to come up with new topics for each site when they really spoke about the same thing: SEO. And SEO is mostly about links.
Right site, wrong market
I realized that as a site for pulling clients 14th Colony did an ok job but that my focus had moved to the content. I love this work and it shows. Hundreds of pages about website design, SEO and even customer service reveals my passion is for discussing technical points instead of writing copy that would appeal to potential clients. Let’s face it, most of the content of this blog goes right over my clients heads. I know this because that’s what they keep telling me.
14thC.com as a source for leads was failing and I was no longer interested in drawing as much client work as before. My options were to refocus the content back to the customers or keep going as I had been as an industry site. But SEO has grown too competitive and I’m just not that great a writer to be the next CopyBlogger or whatever.
By opening the market up to business owners, website designers, sales and marketing and SEOs maybe I can get these groups talking together more and understanding what the issues are that they all face. Who better to write these kinds of articles than me? I’ve been on each side of every issue many, many times. 14th Colony now had a new direction.
Practice what you preach
Now that 14th Colony had a new mission a new business model and website layout was in order. After some interesting conversations about ad-based revenue, particularly Adsense, I decided to make 14thC.com ad-based and hopefully make 14th Colony as a company less reliant on client work. I had avoided implementing ads before because they tend to turn away potential clients.
I also decided to focus my client work locally and branch those services into their own site which will be coming soon.
I have to thank my friends for putting up with all the design ideas I had and for their feedback. SEO Refugee offers a free website review and Cre8asite Forums has their Website Hospital. Both sites host a lot of very smart talented people that are worth listening to.
With the physical appearance in order I knew I needed to fix some long-standing SEO issues as far as site structure was concerned. I also needed to reduce my workload by making site management easier. I decided to merge the Linker’s Union content and also to put all the content into WordPress. Not only would this make daily maintenance easier but future layout changes would be much faster and easier with only one set of template files to modify.
The path to success requires one step at a time
As an SEO I know the search engines choke on website changes and that 301 redirects will only take you so far before your rank starts slipping. The blog was actually rated higher in Technorati than the rest of the site and that’s a lot of linkjuice I didn’t want to lose. Linker’s Union also had a higher PR score than 14th Colony and I wanted to capitalize on that as well.
My plan was pretty strait-forward. I focused on Google because my experience has shown Yahoo! and MSN/Live figure out site changes much faster.
- Get a clear view of how Google views the sites.
- Change the permalink structure to improve performance on 14thC (the old way was post numbers instead of categories and post titles).
- Wait for Google to adapt.
- Merge Linker’s Union content into 14th Colony.
- 301 the LU pages individually to their new homes on 14thC.
- Wait for Google to adapt.
- Once the LU content showed up in the 14thC site: check implement the new site design.
- 301 the old pages to their new locations.
Early Results
By taking my time and waiting for Google to prove it had figured out what was going on I avoided significant drops in rank so my traffic has continued it’s steady gain through this process. Since this process started about 2 months ago I see an additional 17% increase in unique traffic, 14% increase in overall traffic and 12% growth in page views.
Ad-clicks over the past day are up as well as are their PPC values. One day is not enough time to determine a result but if that holds I will be very happy!
PS. Redesign is in the air! Check out the new look for SEO Refugee that incorporates a new blog-based home page, color scheme and even cartoons!
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