Web Site Re Design for “A Vegan No More”

In March of 2012, Tasha decided to leave the world of blogging and focus on other areas of her life. I’m sad to see her go – she was one of my favorite clients. It was an interesting ride with her from start to finish, to say the least! 

Shout It Out Design makes the entire experience of creating your own dream blog fun, easy, and affordable!

One of the coolest things about having a company that is based on the internet is that you can come across and deal with so many different and interesting people.

When I first started this company, I had planned on dealing with mostly local small businesses and growing into working local mid-size businesses in the future. Never would have I imagined that in the first 6 months of Shout It Out Design I would have been involved with not one, but two of the most read Vegan blogs on the internet.

Not to say that I’m for or against being a Vegan. I’m one of those wacky people who believes that everyone should more or less do what they think is right for themselves. Silly thought, I know, staying out of people’s business & opinions.

I just never really knew any Vegans that closely, so I didn’t think that would be a part of my business.

But when Tasha, from Saudi Arabia, (that’s right, Shout It Out Design is a multi-national business!) sent me an email and shared her story of why she was not only changing the name of her blog & web site, but changing her life – I’m proud to have her as a client. She was very brave to go out and say what she did in front of a close-knit community of people who weren’t (and aren’t) happy with her decision. But in the end, it is her decision and people have to get over it and still read her blog because she is an excellent writer, or don’t.

Overhauling & redesigning her old blog “The Voracious Vegan” into her new home “Voracious Eats” was a smooth switchover until she christened her new web site design with the first entry “A Vegan No More”. Tasha had mentioned that this was going to be a controversial topic, but I don’t think either of us expected the response that she got in the first 72 hours. Her site(s) were visited by well over 115,000 people (unique visitors) in 3 days. Her comments section was flooded with supporters & haters alike. I even got roped into the controversy as well.

I do my clients’ hosting on my own servers at MediaTemple, which responded well to the spikes in traffic. There was one small crash at about 3:00a EST on the first night – but the site was back up almost instantly and has held up well since.

Before we started moving things over, I noticed that her Google Rank was quite high, especially for a blog. Moving domains can usually cause to start over from scratch, which could take years to accomplish. So, using some simple redirection practices, her Google Rank will remain the same (if not grow, with the recent spike in traffic) on her old blog. And her new blog should start getting a quick boost due to the redirects & the new traffic as well.

We are new in working together, but we have had a lot of fun so far. I loved that she was so hands on about her web site/blog. She wanted it to look a particular way, and I made it do exactly what she wanted. I know there are a lot of designers that don’t care for having someone be so hands-on, but if the customer gets what they want – I’ve done my job. And some of her ideas about the look & feel of her web site gave me new insight about how to design web sites in the future.