Jul

18

Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, Web | 4 Comments

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pet doctor | bicycle mad scientist
Creative Commons License photo credit: Kevin Steele

A recently asked me for a bit of advice regarding merging two corporate domains. Two organizations, with similar or complimentary lines of are now one. What to do about the left-over . A quandary.

Below I’ve outlined 6 areas to consider, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I guess the only reasonable quick- is to first understand the goal for the merged . Once you understand that, you can begin to ask questions about the goals for the new website.

Let me create a fictional example to help illustrate the situation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll outline a couple of things to think about for each of these points.

Obviously there are many more things to consider, but this is a blog post and not a downloadable eBook :)

Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:

Ben’s Bikes (a local mountain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a market leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new mountain bikes. They also have exclusive dealership agreements with a number of the premier mountain bike manufacturers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select clientele and are considered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional mountain biking aficionados.

Sammy’s cycle shop is a general bicycle retailer. They don’t really specialize, but they do have a wide selection of mid-priced bikes in all categories (road, mountain, touring, cruising, kids, etc). They also have multiple locations in the local geographic region.

The businesses have merged and are operating as Ben & Sammy’s cycle therapy. They have a small internal team tasked to manage the website integration.

Now that we understand the landscape, we go back to the quandary of the website. Let’s get to some important questions:

broken bike
Creative Commons License photo credit: casey atchley


These are the visitors to your site; your potential or past customers. Questions you should be asking your team include:

  • Who are you servicing and what are their goals for using your website? This is basic and should be asked before any website is designed (or redesigned).
  • What’s the purpose? Is your website there to appointments, to take orders, or to provide a catalogue of information? Your new site will depend on how well you that questions, and how well your understands that purpose.
Nou web de Brompton
Creative Commons License photo credit: marcbel


This is what your is looking for. Audiences conduct research and order .

  • Inventory — both sites likely have similar , so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make decisions until you’ve evaluated all the assets.
  • What about unique to one …is it still relevant in the new landscape?
  • Keep only that supports the ’s ability to fulfill the goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.
Blog Juice Calculator
Creative Commons License photo credit: inju

Juice
Both sites have some engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of keywords or term. It determines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a particular phrase or keywords are searched upon.

  • Determine if pagerank is really important to your needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
  • 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new , you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the engines know that the previous businesses haven’t vanished, just merged. Setting them up can be a bit technical but is very important to ensure that visitors who’ve bookmarked the old pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.
Shop
Creative Commons License photo credit: perreira

Ancillary touchpoints
Over the of the two previous , you’ll find that there may be some touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular newsletters. You’re going to have to consider migrating
all these to the new site.

  • Now’s a good time to evaluate the integration of your entire process. Where does fit? How about feeds of particular streams…or newsletters? This is where your marketing team will have some valuable input too…really!
  • If you’ve had a website, you’ve likely been measuring traffic to that site. Well, since you’re merging sites, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your website measurement strategy. Will you continue using the or consider purchasing a contract with a provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?
New Orleans Annual Bicycle Beauty Pageant
Creative Commons License photo credit: robholland

Changing external linking
Both have been around for a while, and have a fair number of inbound from other sites and articles.

  • These help build pagerank ( Juice). Yes, they’ll automagically flow through when they hit the 301 redirects, but it’s also good to contact the sites directly and ask them to update their . This is a great time to (re)establish with your website network…work the side of the medium :)
Bright Orange
Creative Commons License photo credit: alq666

Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old will still be bookmarked or linked in old etc. If, perchance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.

  • Keep your old sites live for a year or two. names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to maintain) and leave helpful messages on the appropriate landing pages. Use your analytics and server logs to determine heavily visited pages.

I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I mentioned, this is not a , just a blog post. So, there are many more things to consder in the merge process. I’ve listed a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.

Jun

15

Content Management Solutions: Upcoming series on Gerry McGovern’s web writing masterclass

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | Leave a Comment



rem:living well is the best revenge
Creative Commons License photo credit: visualpanic

*** Update ***
Oversite on my part, here’s some to the articles in the series directly:

This brief post is just to let you know that I’ll be taking a road less travelled this week by introducing an interview series with a co-worker of mine. She’s because she was able to dodge my Zombie-brain-eating-behaviour while enlighteningly (new word alert) engaging in an interview.

As you’ve no doubt gathered from the title of this post, we’re talking about her recent visit to a Gerry McGovern Masterclass on . Put another way, the guru of was spilling the beans on engaging for the …not easy stuff to do!

The series will run for 3 days, and the 4th will have a great summary / key messages document that was produced at the end of the two-day conference.

So if you’ve ever wondered what a Masterclass with Gerry McGovern is like, then check in daily. Sign up for the RSS feed (if you’ve not already) to ensure you don’t miss an installment. If you’ve read Gerry’s ( Killer Web ContentContent Management Solutions: Upcoming series on Gerry McGoverns web writing masterclass (image: ) ), then some of what we’re talking about will be old hat…but there should be a surprise or two in store for you as well.

Jun

13

More cool sites from the Blogging Pack

Filed Under Blogging, Review, Social Media | Leave a Comment


Oh no, here come the Bloggers
Creative Commons License photo credit: Brett L.

It’s been a busy week, but I’ve always made time to visit some sites (and Digg/Stumble posts) within the Pack, which I describe in previous post. Only two sites profiled today…but they’re chock full of bloggy-goodness. Enjoy.

Jun

4

Absolutely the best explaination of Social Media — Common Craft delivers, again!

Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | 1 Comment


A great and video explanation of Social Media. Wikipedia couldn’t do better :)

I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz. may be the next big thing. What’s it all about? This is in Plain English.

Let’s take a visit to Scoopville - a town that’s famous for ice cream. For over 20 years, Big Ice Cream Company has been making high quality ice cream with a big factory in town.

A few years back, the company did focus groups and found out that they could maximize profits by offering three flavors: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.

May

27

Things I learned moving my blog to a new hosting service (it’s easy!)

Filed Under Blogging, How to | 3 Comments


Things I learned moving my blog to a new hosting service (its easy!) (image: 2526037333_07b840e3ec_o)Over the last few weeks you’ll may have noticed that I’ve been and twittering about my blog from the .net to .com.

A few years ago I managed to grab BradGrier.com when it came open, but I’d not decided what to do with it until recently. I’d been having some performance issues (my blog, that is) and decided to test a new hosting provider.

So, the issue. How to move the blog, keep the same look and feel, not lose any Google Juice, and not lose any feed subscribers. Not a trivial set of considerations!

Of course, I turned to my good for advice:

  • How to Move Your Wordpress Blog To A New Web hosting - great technical advice on backing up and restoring your WP blog
  • Use the WordPress Database Backup plugin - I wrote about it recently when my blog crashed, but backups created with it are entirely suitable for use in blog migration
  • Redirecting incoming traffic to the new blog - well, since I’m using the same data structures and permalink structure, the only is one from .net to .com, this was quite ; a .htaccess 301 redirect as described here and here. Slightly technical, but not really too tough.
  • subscribers was also quite , since I use Feedburner to manage subscriptions: simply the Feed Title and Original Feed URL on the Feedburner Feed Details page. DO NOT THE FEED ADDRESS as this will disconnect your readers from your feed — a bad thing :)

A couple of other observations:

  • Set up your new blog/destination site first. Complete importing your data and building your look and feel. Yes, also duplicate posting to this site. You will want to make sure as your readers move they don’t lose any …especially for the tardy ones.
  • Immediately the Feed address in Feedburner. Any new subscribers will never notice, as you are posting to both sites right?
  • Prominently post about the fact that you are your blog. Add a widget or two to the sidebar (make them obvious) to alert your readers to the fact that you are . You want them to begin to identify with the new URL, not the old one, as soon as possible.
  • After a week or two, close commenting on the old feed, with a message directing readers to the new site.
  • After another week or two implement 301 redirects. And test them! @hownottowrite and @lijit both recommended, through twitter, this HTTP header scanning tool and FireFox plugin to validate the redirects (thanks again!).
  • Finally, remember every place you’ve ever used the URL / name, and it.

So, after all that…did you notice? :)

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May

14

Engaging in ‘high risk’ activity - moving my blog

Filed Under Blogging, Doing, Web | 2 Comments


Engaging in high risk activity - moving my blog (image: 20562069_7cf1e2aaec_m)I’ve decided to take the plunge and move my blog to a more traditional .com type (rather than the .net that I currently use). I’m going to keep the .net for more esoteric things, private server, etc.

If you’re this on the old blog (blog.bradgrier.net), then please jump over to the new one, bookmark it, and check it out to make sure it works as you expect. You can find it at blog.bradgrier.com.

The dot-com is more , have a standard ‘expectation ‘of a site or blog when it has a .com address. A .net address seems to have a different ‘expectation’. And I felt the need to try out a new provider.

So, this will mean a bit of :

  • feeds - already moved my feedburner redirects so there should be no disruption
  • Incoming - not sure what to do about this yet. Incoming add value to your ranking, so this transition will cost me some of that precious Google Juice
  • Site duplication - some of the articles I’ve been about domains suggest maintaining duplicate sites for a few months. I’m thinking about this. It may work, but I’d customize the so that some sort of ‘ moved’ message is appended to the feeds etc

But, I’m not the expert here, just the guy doing the work. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about domains? What should I watch out for? What should I do differently?

: David Asch

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Aug

17

This will surely free more of your valuable time

Filed Under Doing | Comments Off


Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work WeekThis will surely free more of your valuable time (image: )) lists 9 items in his ‘Not To Do List’ that make sense and will up your time. I already do number 1, and try to do number 4:

1. Do not calls from unrecognized numbers
Feel to surprise others, but don’t be surprised. It just results in unwanted interruption and poor negotiating position. Let it go to voicemail, and consider using a like GrandCentral (you can listen to leaving voicemail) or Simulscribe (receive voicemails as e-mail).

4. Do not let ramble
Forget “how’s it going?” when someone calls you. Stick with “what’s up?” or “I’m in the middle of getting something out, but what’s going on?” A big part of is GTP—Getting To the Point.

The rest, I need to work on. Check out the list and the comments to his post. Lots of good stuff there.

Jul

30

Pownce just doesn’t do it for me

Filed Under Social Media | 6 Comments


Pownce just doesnt do it for me (image: ) Maybe I’m a doof, but Pownce just isn’t ringing my bell.

Sure, it’s a . It allows file sharing, networking, link sharing, and event coordination, but it might be just too late for me.

I’ve already established a profile on Twitter and Jaiku. I marry them together through the magic of and a handy little called TwitKu: I enter my ‘tweet’ once, in a single window, and it’s sent to both networks…a very sweet tweet ;-)

Pownce doesn’t have anything like that. Pownce just doesn’t show me a stream of all my friends, unlike and Jaiku. Sure, I could take all my Pownce friends and manually add them to a Feedblendr (hey, where did that ‘e’ go?) feed, but every time I added a new Pownce , I’d have to update my Feedblendr feed. Too much work.

So, for now, my Pownce account is seeing little usage. I do have a few Pownce invites for anyone who wants to take it for a spin…but if you really want to partake in my ‘lifestream’, then check out my Twitter or my Jaiku feeds.

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