Hi, guys! If you’re a Dogster community member, you’ve likely already seen the site update posts we’ve made earlier in the year about the redesign that’s in the works. If you’re a Dog Blog reader who doesn’t frequent our community areas, here’s the skinny: Our redesign launch date is scheduled for Monday, March 12 (give or take a few days for final tweaks).
The community areas of the sites (Pet Pages, Groups, Forums, Diaries, Gifts, Messaging, Answers, Adoption, Local, and the Community homepage) will not be changing. But some exciting changes will be coming to our editorial areas.
All your favorite Dogster blogs — the Dog Blog, Vet Blog, and Living with Dogs — are going to be rolled into what we’re calling Dogster Magazine. So instead of visiting several URLs to see our daily content, you’ll just need to visit the Dogster.com homepage to see everything in one combined feed. No, there won’t be a print magazine (though that would be cool … aaand probably more work than our two-person in-house editorial team can handle).
Our news editor, Maria Goodavage, will still be bringing you the daily news; Dr. Eric Barchas will still be answering your questions; and Julia Szabo will still be interviewing interesting people for us. Most of our current blog contributors (Christine Martinez, Casey Lomonaco, Anna Zeman) will be writing for Dogster Magazine as well.
We’ve got some new contributing writers we think you’re going to dig, and Dogster will also be launching a new web video series featuring some HQ personalities. We won’t say too much about that here, but we really hope you’ll love it as much as we do!
We have slowly been migrating all of our blog archives from WordPress (which currently hosts all our blogs) to Orion, our parent company SAY Media’s brand-new home-built publishing platform. Next Thursday, March 8, and Friday, March 9, there will be no blogging or posting while we move the final bits of content to Orion before we flip the switch and set the new homepage live.
On the week beginning Monday, March 12, you will notice that when you try to get to any of our blogs you will be redirected to the homepage, where the freshest content from all our authors will appear. If you subscribe to the Dog Blog’s RSS feed, that will be updated so you will continue to get Maria’s news items.
On our site update blog, community manager Lori Malm just posted the latest screen grab of what the new homepage will likely look like. PLEASE NOTE that this isn’t final. We’re still deciding what the final background will be and are tweaking a lot of little design-related things, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek of the direction we’re going in:
As part of SAY Media’s Clean Campaign, our homepage will have just one big ad (seen on the right side) instead of our current homepage’s three ads.
That’s all for now. We’ll do another reminder post on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 7, so nobody wonders why we won’t be publishing fresh content on Thursday and Friday.
Best Woofs,
The Editors at Dogster HQ
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