Wine Peeps News: Redesigned Site, New Logo, Twitter, and More



By Kori ~ February 7th, 2009.

20090207_blog_snapshotWelcome to our newly redesigned Wine Peeps site! For those of you reading this via RSS, email, or some other medium, we hope you’ll drop by the new site to check it out.

Redesigned Site

We launched the new site tonight and think we have all of the bugs out, but please take a look around and let us know if anything looks amiss. Many thanks to my wonderful husband Colby (our Wine Peeps tech guy) for all his hard work in getting the new site up and running.

After a year of working hard to build up interesting, competent content, we thought that it was time to spruce up the look and feel of Wine Peeps. The changes are purely cosmetic, though; all of our content remains intact. You will still be able to search, browse categories, read older posts, and visit our tabbed pages for additional information.

I’d like to highlight a few of the changes we’ve made:

  • Recent Posts and Recent Comments – We added the Recent Posts and Recent Comments sections on the left to give you a quick snapshot of recent Wine Peeps activity.
  • Tell a Friend – We added the Tell a Friend button to the end of each post so that you can quickly and easily share the post via email or by posting it to Facebook, Twitter, or another social networking or bookmarking site.
  • Subscribe to Updates – We have made our Subscribe to Updates via RSS and Email more prominent on the right and hopefully easier to use.
  • Follow/Friend Me – We added this section on the right so that you can easily follow or friend me on several social networking sites. More on those below.
  • Avatars in Comments – Now you have the ability to personalize your comments with an avatar (a picture or symbol that represents you). If you do not already have a personalized avatar and would like one, you can go to Gravatar to sign up. When you leave a comment on Wine Peeps with the same email address that you’ve registered with Gravatar, your avatar will automatically appear.

As time goes on, we will be doing additional tweaking and possibly adding even more new features. We hope that you like what we’ve done and will continue to come back as well as tell your friends about us.

Logo1New Logo

As we began discussing ideas for our site redesign, we felt that our first priority was to develop a Wine Peeps logo so that readers would have a visual image to associate with us. Many thanks to our good friend Ross Heeter for the fabulous new logo.

Twitter

Recently, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. I had been observing Twitter from a distance over the past year but after attending the Wine Bloggers Conference last October and seeing how many Twitter devotees are out there, I felt that it was time to get on board. Twitter is an excellent way to engage in the wine blogging community as well as interact with readers and fellow wine lovers in an informal atmosphere (in short, 140 character messages). In addition to tweets announcing new Wine Peeps blog posts, I will be tweeting about other wine-related things that I am doing or that are on my mind. It will allow me to share about wines that I am drinking that may not make it into a formal blog post or ones that may appear in a post down the road. I’ll also tweet about random non-wine things from time to time just to keep things interesting, but I’ll do my best not to bore you with trivial things like “I’m off to wash my hair now.” If you are already on Twitter or if I’ve enticed you to sign up, please Follow Me.

And More

In addition to Twitter, I am also on a couple other social networking sites. I invite you to Friend Me on OpenWine Consortium and LinkedIn as well.

Please let us know what you think of our new site. Whether you love it, hate it, or fall somewhere in between, please leave a comment below or send us a message via our Contact Us form. We’d love to know what you like as well as what needs improvement so that we can continue to make Wine Peeps better and better.


Filed under: Announcements

Reader's Comments

  1. Paul Zitarelli | February 7th, 2009 at 10:32 am

    Wow, Kori; congrats! Must be nice to have web design and tech support all in the family. The new site looks amazing!

  2. Kori | February 7th, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    Thanks, Paul. Glad you like the site. We are very excited about it. And yes, we are very lucky to have our own in-house tech guy. 🙂

  3. Allan Wright | February 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    I agree with Paul. The site looks excellent, as does the new logo. Good work, Colby.

  4. Jerry Arni | February 7th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    It looks very clean in the layout and design. Thanks for all of the superb information presented in a nontechnical way.

  5. Kori | February 7th, 2009 at 4:45 pm

    Thanks, Allan. I look forward to seeing you at WBC in July.

  6. Kori | February 7th, 2009 at 4:46 pm

    Thanks, Jerry. Glad you like the site and the content. Thanks for reading!

  7. Colby | February 7th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    Thanks for the compliments, we are very excited about new the look! Our friend Ross @ Interactive Heet is the genius behind the logo.

  8. Jeff | February 10th, 2009 at 7:32 am

    Congrats, Kori and John.

    The site looks fantastic!

    Jeff

  9. Kori | February 10th, 2009 at 8:32 am

    Thanks, Jeff. We are excited about it and glad to hear that others like it too.

  10. Pete | February 10th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

    Site looks fantastic… dig the logo too!

  11. Kori | February 10th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    Thanks so much, Pete. We’re very happy with how the site turned out. And we think Ross did an excellent job with the logo, too.