Welcome, Penelopes!
We are so excited to finally show you the brand-new version of our little neat + tidy portion of the internet. We worked for months on this project and we hope you love it as much as we do.
Settle in and stay a while, would you?
The site has a new look, obviously, and one that we think perfectly fits the Penelope personality: clean, smart, well-organized with a touch of comfortable elegance. (Man, that’s a tired phrase. But, it fits!) It’s main color is my favorite color: peacock blue, which I blithely refer to as Penelope blue. It makes me so happy and you’ll see a lot of it.
But, even more importantly, we’re hoping that the site accomplishes the goals we set out for it.
Here’s what we think the new site does:
- Establishes a new brand identity which gives us the jumping off point to grow as a content website, rather than a traditional blog.
- Gives us the ability to really feature, visually and in excerpt form, some of the best content of the site. I feel like so much of it was buried in the archives. We’ve now brought it out into the sunshine.
- Creates “Category” pages for the content. This is huge both from a reader’s perspective, but also for SEO purposes. We’re now able to search-engine-optimize the shit out of those pages and that’ll be a good thing for findability.
- Makes it easier for first-time visitors to quickly get a sense of what being a Penelope is all about. She won’t have to search around to figure it out.
- Gives us many more options for in-article content formatting. We now have more ability to do cool lists and galleries in several styles, or call out quotes in interesting ways. You’ll see more of that as we create new content going forward.
- We are able to show a bio for the author of each post and link to her full bio in the Team section. That enables you all to be better able to get to know these new voices.
- Speaking of, the new site has a brand new Team page, which introduces all the new contributors to the Penelope site and gives you some great info about each one and why I wanted them involved in all things Penelope.
- Creates a newsletter sign-up option (see the top right of the page) which allows us to keep all serious Penelope fans abreast of what’s going on on the site, and will enable us to be offer content to subscribers that never appears on our website. Penelope-only content.
- Makes it easier for us to communicate with each other: commenting (and replying to comments) is now so much easier than in the old site, and it’s super simple to find out how to follow us in several ways. Just see those sparkly gold buttons at the top right of the site. My fondest wish is that you’ll choose your favorite and follow us. Every new follower and fan jazzes us no end. Seriously, it’s embarrassing how excited we get.
- And, gives us the foundation for a Shop, where we will eventually be selling PLL-branded organization tools (like the notebook shown here), as well as other curated items.
Whew! Those were a lot of goals and I think we accomplished them all. (And you should see how many lists it took to get us there!)
But you guys let us know: how did we do? What’s great and what’s missing? What would you like to see? Tell us!
We want this site to be a favorite destination for you. The more feedback you give us, the better we can do for you.
Settle in and stay a while, will you? We’re happy you’re here.
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