The Future Buzz is now sporting an all-new look. My name is Michael Martin, and I’ve been working with Adam on this for the past few months. I’d love to share some insight into the thoughts behind the redesign, and get your feedback on it all too!

Just to sidestep first and give you a quick overview of who we are; I work in a small web design team called Pro Blog Design. We specialize in all things WordPress and we worked with Adam on his last design too, so it was an honor when he got in touch with us again for version 4!

Moving straight on though…

Why Redesign?

This is a question that all site owners ask themselves every now and again. Why redesign? Building a new design from scratch is a big undertaking, so it’s not a choice that anyone makes lightly.

In Adam’s case, the main reason was to take The Future Buzz to the next level. Until now, The Future Buzz has been very much Adam’s personal blog, and this has worked wonderfully.

With the traffic that The Future Buzz now gets though, it was time to re-evaluate. Should this come across as a personal blog? Will there always be just one main writer? Is it time to put more emphasis on advertising?

With those thoughts in mind, we decided on a fundamental change to the layout. It was time to go from a personal blog to publication.

There are two main approaches you can take to get to a “publication” look. Let’s give them a more informal name here:

1. The New York Times / BBC approach.
2. The Smashing Magazine / Mashable approach.

The NY Times/BBC approach works well for sites with a team of authors and a lot of content published. The Future Buzz isn’t making a drastic leap to that, Adam is still going to be the #1 writer here and we still want to put full focus on the articles, so we chose the latter.

What About the Style?

We’ve talked about the functional reasons to redesign, but what about the visual ones? In the previous design, the major goal for the design was to look cool and professional. Blue and grey; color schemes don’t get much more professional than that.

In the new design though, Adam wanted to bring a lot more color into the site. The biggest complaint with the existing design was that it had simply gone too minimal and plain; it needed a little more zest to it.

This probably worked out as the biggest challenge with the design. As my partner eloquently put it, there’s a fine line between a vibrant colorful site, and a site selling children’s toys. We experimented a lot with this:

Our initial approach was a smaller step than Adam was looking for:

So we came back with plenty of variations, including some that went too far as well:

The end result was somewhere between the two extremes here (Which is a good sign we considered the range of options I think!)

When it comes to an intangible decision like this, then experimenting as much as possible is the only way to really make your choice. Forget planning it all out, just get stuck in and see what works.

Priorities, Priorities

In every project we do, we ask the client to list their priorities, in order. They can’t just give us a collection of things they want, it is numbered and there can only be one number 1.

This is crucial for us, because it forces everyone to see exactly where the priorities lie. Is the number 1 goal increasing subscribers, selling ads, building social profiles, selling products, or one of the hundred other goals a site might have?

With The Future Buzz, number one is still the community. There are a few more ads than before, but never in preference to the community. Let me give you an example of that:

This is a shot of the new sidebar. Community options first, ad second.

New Features

The site now includes a job board, which I’m sure Adam will be telling you all much more about. There are a lot of options about nowadays for setting up a job board, but Adam had discovered Simply Hired, who offered an extremely simple solution to set up.

Sometimes, the easiest solution really is the best. We could have invested a lot of time into building the perfect setup for the new site, only to find a few months later that a job board isn’t right for The Future Buzz.

That’s what makes Simply Hired the better choice; we have no investment upfront. If it doesn’t work out, we just remove it and no harm done. If it’s a big success, we can always come back later and build the ideal solution.

Aside from that, Adam came up with a nifty idea for comments. Beside each of your comments, you will see your total number of comments displayed (like in the previous design), but now your link color depends on your comments number as well. 100+ is gold, so that’s your target to aim for!

For anyone curious though, the code to display the total number of comments from a particular commenter is simple enough:

global $wpdb;
$count = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( “SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_author_email = %s AND comment_approved = 1″, get_comment_author_email() ) );

Then just echo $count; where you’d like the number displayed. Feel free to read up more on the $wpdb object if you’d like to know more about writing your own MySQL queries in WordPress!

So How Did We Do?

That should give you some oversight into how this new site came to be, so now I’d love to hear your thoughts on it all!

What have we done well? And what could we have done better? Let’s hear it in the comments!

How We Redesigned The Future Buzz is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

To accomplish this, the site definitely needs a refresh to minimize my name and place more emphasis on the brand of the blog and on the content / community. I also think a modern trade publication needs more of a visual identity, and so I’ve challenged my design team (Pro Blog Design) to do something more colorful and stylish yet still maintain the feel of the existing site.

So with that said, I am excited to share with you a sneak preview of the next rev of this site. This will be the fourth design iteration and I think the best yet.

Click the image below for a full size version:

Also – bonus for the community: we’ll be releasing the current theme as a free download for users (sans-logo). So if you dig the current look and want to use it for your own blog that will soon be possible.

We hope you enjoy the preview of the new design. Let us know what you think as this design is being done to improve your experience here.

Sneak Preview: The Future Buzz v 4.0 is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

With that said the goal of this blog when I started in 2007 was simple: to share my ideas and opinions with you. And I’ve greatly enjoyed doing that. I don’t plan to stop. Interestingly enough, however, the best part hasn’t even been publishing my ideas. Rather it has been inspiring discussions and bringing together an extremely bright group interested in digital media, marketing and PR.

So I have a new goal for the site: to become an essential destination for our category, driven by you, the community. How will we do this? In essence, I am planning to iterate The Future Buzz from my personal blog into something closer to a digital marketing industry trade. For existing subscribers you’re already setup and won’t need to change a thing. We’re just going to make things even better for you.

My sense is there is room in the market for a new type of trade publication. The existing ad, marketing and PR trades do great work writing up tips, trends and stories. I even contribute to some of them on occasion. A long tail of personal bloggers do an amazing job writing up the industry from their perspective. Several industry aggregators bring together the mix of our category.

But I think The Future Buzz can take a different approach, one that focuses relentlessly on creativity, community and passion for our industry. With 50K visitors per month and more than 22K subscribers opted in via RSS, email, Facebook and Twitter I think we have the numbers to become a meaningful and new type of trade.

You’ll notice over the past few months I’ve brought comments into the content mix and opened up the site to guest bloggers. These are just the first steps. I have many additional ideas to implement that will help amplify your thinking and give a voice to interested readers but in testing just a a few and getting feedback I’m excited to push this further.

Another critical next step is design. The current theme is minimal and perfect for what I wanted as a personal blog. But it won’t work for what’s next. I’m currently working through a new concept with the brilliant team of designers at Pro Blog Design. Expect something fresh and different.

Here’s where I need your help. I said this would be a different kind of trade publication. One of the reasons why is this will be a collaborative project. I know you’re interested in collaborating based on existing levels of participation and I’m hoping re-positioning this site as a trade vs. my personal blog will inspire even greater levels of this.

I’ve been gathering feedback at conferences, from industry friends and even coworkers. However I also want to ask you directly: what is it you want from a trade publication? Also what aren’t you getting from the current trades we can provide?

I’d love your subjective response as a comment below. This will help me push the site forward into the next iteration. If you’re too shy to comment, feel free to email me as I’d love to collect as many of your thoughts as possible so what I create next can be a shared vision from all of you.

Not a community member yet? Be sure to grab our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook so you don’t miss what’s next.

Help Input To The Next Iteration Of The Future Buzz is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

1. 50 Viral Images The Web Shared In 2010

2. How I Build A 6 Figure Facebook Fan Page

3. Unnecessary Quotation Marks

4. How And Why To Reduce Meetings

5. Data Visualization And Infographics To Tell Your Story

6. Digital Marketing Strategy Development: 12 Common Problems

7. Architecting A Social Web Marketing And PR Strategy

8. The Ongoing Myth That Web Content Must Always Be Short

9. Viral Marketing 101 – Seeding Your Campaign

10. 700k Reasons Why NY Times Has An RSS Feed, Not A Facebook Page

Other fun facts about 2010 for me personally:

• Moved from Minneapolis to San Fransisco to join global communications agency LEWIS PR
• Worked with 20+ companies – start-ups to Fortune 50′s – on developing and implementing social media/SEO strategies
• Drafted 132+ new posts for readers here at The Future Buzz and more than 25 posts at Online Marketing Blog
• Spoke at 5 events including being a keynote speaker for an international association
• Went car-free
• Spent time all over the country – including New York, Toronto, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami and Boston

Here is my wrap of 2009 if you want to see what happened last year.

Thank you for being a member of this community and I greatly looking forward to continued discussions.

Feel free to use the comments to let me know what you’d like more of in 2011 (post ideas, themes, etc.) and I’ll try and fulfill them.

The Future Buzz Most Popular Posts – 2010 Edition is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

And that’s the quick lesson I want to share with you today.  Something which is easily forgotten is that if you produce digital content you can lose all your work in a split-second.  And that’s not a very fun thing when you spend years building a community. In fact, it’s a quite frightening position I hope you never find yourself in.  Unfortunately it’s a reality that can happen to any of us and it’s far better to realize it and prepare for it than hide from it. The good news is that if you’re prepared, it’s almost always fixable.

So consider this a quick backup PSA.  I don’t care if you are using someone else’s platform, are self hosted, on a shared host or cloud server, whatever – you should still create backups on a frequent basis (ideally through automation so they happen whether you remember or not).  If you’re already backing up your data great – feel good about it because, trust me, you will be extremely happy when you can recover it.

Data protection is an area where the old adage, “old an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” couldn’t be more true.

This is not new advice, but if it reminds any of you to start a routine of data backup, it’s a very worthwhile idea to spread.

A Friendly Reminder: Backup Your Data is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing