Welcome to our brand new overhauled site, now powered by WordPress. We’re calling this blomerus.org 4.0 because its the 4th massive change we’ve made since our site’s inception. We wrote about the changes when we launched 3.0. Here’s a quick visual progression from 2004 in Joomla to 2009 in iweb to now:
Getting Help
Our internet situations has drastically improved in the last 2 years in South Africa, thus allowing us to finally choose what we had wanted all along: WordPress. Last time we did all the changes on our own and this time we knew we couldn’t handle that. With so much on our plate already, we knew the only way this could happen is with reinforcements. Much thanks to our generous friend, Brian. He is responsible for the current appearance and layout, although all the text and photos are ours. Let me throw in a shameless plug: If you are looking to hire someone proficient in WordPress, who pays attention to detail and who is also serving in Africa get in touch with him.
Why WordPress?
Alot of reasons compelled us to switch. But a big game changer for us was that Apple has basically abandoned iweb’s development. Alot of pretty basic features that SHOULD be in iweb (like tagging and sharing options) are not there. Yes there’s 100 run around ways to get those. But at some point, you just want something that works outright and is keeping up with the rapidly changing scope of the internet.
What’s new?
A few features of the site we’d like to point out:
1) Home Page geared for new readers:
You’ll notice our home page is no longer in the blog format. We debated this choice but felt the sliders would serve to show there’s new content on the site and our regular readers are mostly subscribed. If you are not subscribed, its one click… go for it. What was lacking was the first impression. When we point a brand new person to our site who maybe knows nothing of what we do, they need to get that information right away and not dig for it to get a fuller picture. So right away the who, what, and why upon landing here. Even some of that in video format. We felt that was important for our growing network and readership. Hopefully it makes it easier for you to share with friends too, without having to explain a whole lot.
2) Sharing & Commenting
Commenting was always broken in iweb. So we had to basically abandon that which made the site feel a bit like a monolouge. Now normal commenting is back and you have a chance to interact more. Sharing options make it easy to spread the love.
3) Tag Cloud
We write about all kinds of things from adoption to Titus Project to tech stuff, etc. Some of our readers are here for the ministry and one life impact stories. Some like the keeping it real and parenting side of things. Others are just curious about life in South Africa. Whatever you are here for, its nicely organized and easy to find similar posts.
4) Subscription options
Now you have 2 ways to subscribe (top right): in a reader or just getting new posts in your inbox. If you are signed up for newsletters & the South African snapshot, we won’t automatically sign you up to get every post in your inbox. So now is the time to subscribe. We’ll let you choose if you want that or not. Also, finally a pesky issue of RSS readers not being able to see images is fixed. YAY!
There’s alot more, just take a look around. Thanks for coming along on the tour.
PS: You’ll notice not all of our posts haven’t yet migrated over. Unfortunately we had to move over post by post the old fashioned way. We still have a bunch to do, but decided to launch with the bulk of it done. Likewise, there are some broken links that have no where to go until the older posts are up. If you are looking for an old post and can’t find it, please let us know so we can get it up for you, we tried to guess which would be people’s favorites. If you happen to find anything else that isn’t working, let us know. This helps & is not going to hurt our feelings. Thanks for being such a great reader!
LOVE the new site! We use wordpress too, but just did it ourselves. Yours is way better! GREAT job