Fuzzy Future Technologies

Bookmark Bliss: A Daily Blog About Online Business. Bookmark Bliss was developed to be a place to move articles that used to be posted on a blog (hosted at www.fuzzyfuture.com) when we decided to use that URL for our business instead. The goal for the site was simply to create a blog that was easy to read and maintain, encouraged contributions from readers in the form of comments, and was optimized to rank well in search engine queries.

Our Approach

Our first step was to examine what had made our old blog popular. We determined that it was easy to read, simple to subscribe to our RSS feed, and it encouraged readers to contribute comments and suggestions on a regular basis. In addition, we examined the administration of the site and decided to continue using WordPress for content management due to its ease of use and large set of features. In terms of migration of content, we determined the best method would be to transfer the old site to the new URL, maintaining all article names and paths, and implement a 301 redirect from the old content to the new content in order to preserve Google search index rankings.

Our Expertise

In order to accomplish our goals, we modified an existing WordPress theme that was similar to our desired look and feel for the site. We made several modifications to the theme including a complete change of the colour scheme and implementation of several style changes that allowed us to better display our articles in the same fashion as the old blog. Once the fresh WordPress installation was in place, we developed several PHP based scripts that allowed us to copy the content from the old site to the new one without losing any of the original structure. To maintain our Google rankings for articles, we implemented several mod_rewrite redirects in our .htaccess file to 301 redirect all original content to the equivalent content on the new site.

Our Results

Overall, the move from the old blog to the new one was a complete success. We managed to move all articles, comments, and other content from one site to the other without losing any traffic. All of our rankings in Google were 100% maintained and all links to our articles correctly redirected from one site to the other. In terms of visitors, our readership increased more than three fold after the change including an increase of almost 1,000 new subscribers to our RSS feed. Unfortunately, a year or so after moving, we decided to move onto other projects and Bookmark Bliss stopped updating in late 2007.