In what seems to be unintentionally growing into a twice-a-year ritual, I’ve uncorked yet another reworking of kylebunch.com and my other Bunch sites. For most of you it won’t feel like any major change. But it solves a few problems that had bothered me since the release of the last version back in June. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new.
It’s probably most accurate to describe this as a continuation of what I did with the last release in June. The title treatment that serves as the centerpiece of the brand direction, is still built around Birra Stout. This is just tightening up the infrastructure that supports the site, and fine-tuning some of the messaging behind different components of the digital whole.
The most obvious change to most will be the change of my Tumblr from The Raw Feed (raw.kylebunch.com) to The Daily Bunch (daily.kylebunch.com). It’s not a big deal, I just started feeling like The Raw Feed sounded more disorganized and frenetic than I intended. So I made that change in Tumblr, through together a quick Futura Condensed title treatment, and made some DNS and .htaccess changes, and The Daily Bunch was born.
But the biggest fundamental change is a move from the Thematic theme framework to Thesis. I’m not going to bore you with a point-by-point assessment of each one, as both are excellent and give any designer or site owner an excellent foundation on which to build any site. I had simply struggled with a couple issues in Thematic that were available as out-of-the-box features with Thesis (you can see an extended preview of Thesis and its breathtaking elegance on the right-hand side of this page).
I installed Thesis and within an hour I had made all of the customizations on each page that I always wanted (which is why you no longer have to look at The Daily Bunch on every page).
Along with the WordPress theme framework change, there’s one other significant infrastructure addition — the integration of MailChimp as the email distribution and list management provider for The Daily Bunch. TDB really started as an afterthought. It was something I tossed together because Feedburner made it easy, but didn’t give much thought to after it was up and kicking. But as time went on, I realized that email is still an essential way to communicate with a lot of people, and putting in some more time and effort into the email subscription portion of kylebunch.com could pay significant dividends. So I made the switch to MailChimp, and I’m actually able to make the TDB email look good (and not exactly like a million other Feedburner-based emailers).
As always, this is a work in progress. But for now, my hope is that the evolution of kylebunch.com and my digital ego can proceed that much more rapidly, building on a significantly stronger foundation.
