The Site Rebrand

If you guys have been visiting my site for some time, you may have noticed that thing are looking pretty different these days. And moreso than that, the name of my site has changed. I had been thinking about making the change for some time and in the end, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and go for it.

In this post I am going to share with you why I made the change, the steps that I took, the pitfalls of changing my sites name and just about everything else in-between.

 

 

Why I decided to change up my site.

When I first started my first site, I was nervous. I didn’t want to post on a site with my name attached to it because I was fearful of ridicule from others. It was a nervous time for me and my primary goal was making sure that my site remained anonymous. However, I have come a long way since then. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t want people I know to discover my site, purely because people can’t help but pass comment. However, there is no getting away from the fact that this site has changed my life and I no longer want to hide behind a wall of annonimity.

 

The steps that I took.

First things first, I wanted to change up my site theme. It is still by the same amazing company, which you can find more about in the footer. However, they had a more up-to-date version of my original theme which I fell in love with. Implementing the new theme wasn’t without its challenges. You may be able to see that this theme has many different elements and it wasn’t the most straight forward thing to set up. However, once that was in place, I began to think about what I wanted my brand to be. In the end, I wanted to completely remove The Reluctant Blogger and head to Danielle Writes. Mainly because even though on this site I write blog posts, I want this one site to encompass all of my writing endeavours, whether it be my freelance work, novel writing, proofing services, etc.

 

How the process went.

After I purchased my domain, I spoke to my website hosting company. I asked their opinion on the best way to swap over. It made me nervous. I have built websites professionally before and I was well aware of the issues that I may face. However, after four different conversations with their team, I was confident that it was time to go ahead and make the change. However, after they made the swap, I began to see issues arising. In a nutshell and to put it as simply as possible, the only redirect that was set up was from the homepage. Every other page on my site was suddenly dead and then had over 1000 pages and posts that I had to manually set about trying to redirect.

 

The difference that I have seen.

As I have mentioned, as I switched my site, not only to the new theme but also to the new URL, it has been a constant battle. In the first instance, I did see a negative hit. Especially when my hosting company messed up the transfer of my domain. Suddenly, people who were searching for my previous URL couldn’t find my site and were met with a spam notice. If people were trying to go to a direct post within my site, once again they would be met with a firewall warning. However, since putting in the work and rectifying those issues myself, I am seeing positive impacts in other areas, but I think it will be some time before I am able to clearly tell you if it has been a beneficial move for me.

 

What this means for my site.

Generally speaking, I know that there is still going to be some impact to my site traffic in the short term. As search engines begin to trawl my site, I will regain some of those organic rankings once again. However, I am trying to think more long-term. I know that this is the best thing for my site and brand moving forward. There was simply never going to be a good time to make the change and I am glad that I finally went ahead and bit the bullet.

 

As always, I hope you guys enjoyed this post and learning a little more about this change-up. It has been a long old road and to be honest, it hasn’t been straightforward since I went ahead and made the swap. For anybody else that is out there thinking about doing something similar, I would highly recommend considering your options and thinking what the negative implications may be. I feel very fortunate that I have been able to rectify most of the issues myself due to my extensive background with websites and marketing. However, I know that most people out there will not be as nerdy as myself in that specific area!

Be sure to leave me a comment below. Let me know what you think of my new rebrand and if you have any questions about the process, please do let me know!