The College Blog Network has beefed up its offerings with a slew of new features detailed on their blog post. TCBN’s Dan Wasyluk kindly sent Blog Network Watch a summary of the latest changes:

We have finally got our RSS feeds up and running and our happy to provide custom RSS feeds for our users that connect them with the latest posts from their favorite college blogs all in one feed. We also have expanded to allow alumni to join the network and made some minor members area upgrades as well. We are working on widgets at the moment and then pushing forward to our new design.

It is evident that this new wave of advanced marketing strategies using blogs and content writing has been the new resort of most companies in the world of business today. These are the new elements that have helped businesses evolve into better managed companies aimed at attaining set goals.

Marketing is the life stream of any business entity and all marketing people will exhaust all means to use any advanced and new ways of making marketing strategies work. Hence, the new age of marketing has turned to these technology driven gifts called blogging and content writing and have had headway in doing so as we can see today.

In a time where marketing automation is a big focus, it’s important not to forget that your website is, “...the place that brings everything together in a unified place…” This is a very important point. Think about the times you’ve received marketing communications from a company, gone to their website, and been confused because what you encountered there was nothing related to their marketing communication. Consistency of story is hugely important to having your content drive action. – New Rules of Marketing & PR

[tags]blogging, blog marketing, marketing practices, marketing strategies, advertising, promotions[/tags]

Blogs can get boring after some time. Readers look out for new things, and sometimes they (we, actually) easily tire of the same old design elements, same old content and writing style, and even same old blogger. Fortunately, some people out there know what it takes to rouse back interest from readers. Or maybe in the first place, your blog had been boring from the start. Performancing has just the thing for you. A blog reboot!

Do you have a blog sitting around that you want help with? Want to take it to the next level but don’t know how? Well youre in luck. We are a panel of experts that’s right all of us in someway whether design is your flaw, content creation, or no inbound links or marketing. We have all the tricks up our sleeves.
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We will take one a week and spend one week giving you tips and sharing that with the community. It’s a once in a lifetime chance to really launch your site into the next level of authority.

The guys over at Performancing will only be helping with the reboot of a few blogs, though. They will personally guide the blogger in how they can improve their sites. But we can all still learn from their experiences. Here is the basic framework to be used. I hope to get some good ideas from Peformancing myself.

ForeverGeek, which I used to be part of has recently undergone a massive redesign. The site has also switched from Movable Type to Wordpress. I didn’t realize FG had been redesigned until I saw it on my feed reader.

Today we are making the leap from Movable Type to Wordpress. We also have a snazzy new design that we will be debuting. Anyway, this is just a warning to be prepared for some technical difficulties. Thank you, for your time, and attention

And there are still technical difficulties, which you can expect whenever you switch designs, more so when you shift to a new blogging platform altogether. I’ve always had some issues with the use of Movable Type back when I was an editor at ForeverGeek. And while the design was a classic, I thought it needed a fresh reboot, especially given today’s trends focusing on usability and fast loading.

Apparently, the excellent designers over at Bloggy Network’s Design Disease have done well.

Brand and identity are some of the most important aspects of blog networks. These are usually enhanced by visual styling and elements that member blogs have. Some blog networks prefer to give their members a free rein on their respective designs, but just ask each to put up a badge with the network logo. Others, meanwhile, require that blogs sport matching themes. This is kind of like what we’re doing here on Splashpress Media—with the across-the-board theme revamp.

Bayanihan Blog Network, one of the newest blog networks in the block, is one of those that prefer matching looks. The BBN has recently launched its new theme on two of its member sites, particularly the Comic Blurb and You Had Me At Hello.

The theme is a clean-looking three-column layout that’s friendly to the eyes and easily accommodates advertising, with a big space at the header. The designer Gail dela Cruz-Villanueva sure knows what elements to include and how to best lay out a site optimized both for easy reading and clicking (of the ads, of course!).

Gawker Media has unleashed a redesign of its signature site Wonkette according to this post over at Blogebrity...

Over at BusinessLogs, Mike Rundle has posted a few thoughts on the redesign of 9rules:

People visit blogs because of the interesting content, well at least I do. The extraordinary growth of blogs in the past year could be attributed to many factors, but one factor I like to think about is that more information is now available to everyday citizens because of the Internet, and more regular people now have the opportunity to voice their opinions via their blogs. More information, more people online, more opinions. However, more people and more blogs means that more people read blogs and are itching to find good ones, and that concept was the beginning of 9rules. People are looking for good content to read, and we want to find and present that content to them….

Aaron Brazell, of b5media, has redesigned his blog at Technosailor with one of the more interesting blog designs & architectures that I’ve seen in quite some time.

Aaron’s new design allows a reader to view the blog in a traditional blog format, or in a conversational format, or by browsing a list of the best writing he’s done on his blog.

But don’t take my word for it, see what Aaron has to say.

9rules has posted feedback that they’ve seen about their redesign, code-named “Phoenix”. Scrivs even quoted David Krug:

The New 9rules is genius. Smartest thing they ever did. Video Post coming next week from me about why I think this is so freaking genius. David Krug

Some pretty good feedback – both positive and critical – that continues to lead to an interesting discussion of design…

9rules has redesigned their network pages and added several new features.

One of the more interesting new additions is the “Notes” feature which allows the public to register an account and then interact with the 9rules community as a whole.

And it appears that there is more to come:

The redesigned Community sections are only one part of the full 9rules relaunch, but we feel it’s the most important for our Members and readers. During the week we will be highlighting new features and finishing touches that we are putting on the site. If you notice some things a bit off that’s probably because we still have a lot of work to do, but we are always open to hearing your thoughts and for this reason we have setup the Rulers Community where you can leave us Notes so we can stay on top of things.

CEO Paul Scrivens provides some commentary over at Wisdump:

Last February, I gave a less than glowing review of the old 9rules homepage. I really loved the design when it was finished, but after hearing how many people thought too much was going on I started to understand where they were coming from.

9rules member Paul Stamatiou also has some thoughts:

One of the main problems with the last design regarded usability concerns surrounding communities. The focal point of the redesign, codenamed Phoenix, is the communities section with notes. Notes is a new feature that allows 9rules members and readers alike to discuss posts and news items in every community. Hurry up and register for a notes account before all the good names are taken.

I expect we’ll see some commentary in the hours ahead of us – I’m looking forward to seeing Mike Rundle’s design thoughts at BusinessLogs at some point.

One bit of critical feedback has already been posted at The Skinny:

Reality check number one: Most of the people that go to 9rules are looking to find great blogs on their favorite subjects… not to be part of the community. Ergo, good content needs to be their first prerogative. Not the community.

Some great comments and discussion between Scrivs and others at The Skinny as well.