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Welcome To The New Look Blogtrepreneur

Hey Guys. Well yesterday I didn’t manage to get online as it was firstly my 17th Birthday, secondly it was the Big Match between Chelsea and Liverpool (which we (Chelski) unfortunately lost to on a penalty shootout 🙁 ) and finally because it was the first time I was able to drive under my new insurance, so I went out with my Dad for a little practice.

Anyway, I want to welcome you all to the new Blogtrepreneur Theme designed by Connor Wilson. For all RSS Readers, click here to marvel in the Cutline beauty! As of writing, there are still quite a few changes to be made, but unfortunately with the time difference between Connor and myself, we’re finding it hard to talk to each other on Instant Messenger.

Anyhoo, the site is a lot different from the original, and I’ll give you a rundown of all the new stuff, and the stuff that’s yet to come:

1. Brand new logo – yep the one I had before was too generic and not clean. Connor designed this new one to incorporate a cogged wheel (I’m still not sure what it symbolises). It’s nice and clean and the “B” can be used for avatars in forums and for MyBlogLog.

2. New engine – as mentioned, this time I’m using Chris Pearson’s Tubetorial. Apparently, the coding is much more SEO friendly and as a result, I’m expecting more organic traffic from the search engines.

3. Little AJAX used – I did tell a few people (and had some preliminary designs) which showed slidy sidebars and a lot of AJAX features. However, in order to do this effectively, I would have had to use the K2 theme which isn’t very SEO optimized, and which may put a lot of pressure on my server. And with a blog, I value traffic and subscribers over fancy coding a lot more anyway.

4. Recent Comments section – this was put in using the Get Recent Comments plugin. It allows new visitors to clearly see what’s going on and what discussion is happening by whom and where. Much more community friendly!

5. Top Commentors – this is something that I’m very proud of and a bit sorry that I havn’t implemented earlier. The Show Top Commentors plugin was used, so that whenever you comment, you are ranked upon how many you add (but no silly Spamming ones please). All commentors on the leaderboard (which gets reset every month) will have a nice PR5 backlink pointing to their site as the NoFollow tag has been turned off!

6. New Advertising Options – this is something which you will see more of and which I will talk more about, but as you can see, the Adsense and Adbrite ads are gone! Yep I’ve completely removed them as I feel they don’t add that much benefit to the reader, and they clutter up my design and don’t make me very much money.
Text Link Sponsors are something that I’ll focus more upon, and as you can see in the “Sponsors” section down the right sidebar, NationalPayDay.com with their cash advances are my first paying sponsors – but they’ll get a proper welcome post!
3 image ad spaces will als be added below the logo, and these will be premium ads above the fold, so I hope I can sell a few of those – prices will come soon.

7. Sidebar links have icons – as a finishing touch, each sidebar uses related icons to portray what they mean. For example, the Featured section has little money icons – representing their TLA nature. The use of the “li” tag helped in this.

8. Comments bubble next to Post Title – this little bubble will help people see more quickly what discussion is going on, and shows very nicely the great community I have here to attract new visitors and subscribers.

9. Time Capsule – this hasn’t been implemented yet, but will appear below the logo to show 2 or 3 posts from the past. A new Archives page is also available but this will be more fun and a quick way to show other Popular Posts that I’ve written.

10. Resources Page – this will be the hub of my design and will be in the works up to the release. I hope that this will bring back visitors repeatedly and will contain loads of interesting info for you entrepreneurial bloggers.

Anyway, take a look and give me some feedback – please bear in mind that there are still some changes that need to be made. Unfortunately the CSS Reboot wasn’t too popular due to the poorly formatted Digg style voting that didn’t put the stories with loads of votes onto the front page (like mine). But hopefully this template will be recognised elsewhere!

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