Two winters ago, we unveiled a new design for GigaOM — today, we are launching another one. Whereas before, our focus was on design, this time around we’re aiming to bring you a unique user experience.

Our product guru, Jaime Chen

The biggest change at our company in the intervening two years, of course, has been in the growth of our network, which now totals seven blogs: In addition to this site, we also have TheAppleBlog, jkOnTheRun, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, OStatic and WebWorkerDaily. In short, we generate a lot of content that adheres to the basic ethos of GigaOM.

While I remain a big believer in specialist niches, I feel it’s also important to surface more of the quality work being produced across these properties, such as the Car 2.0 coverage by Josie Garthwaite on Earth2Tech or Simon Mackie’s web working tips. So about six months ago, I asked our product guru, Jaime Chen, to come up with a game plan that would allow us to conduct a complete overhaul. Her mission was to:

• Better showcase new content and related articles so that we can overcome the limitations of the blog format without really moving away from it.
• Give readers an easy way to go to other GigaOM Network properties so that they can discover the work of our entire team of writers.
• Focus on super simple content consumption and discovery.
• Enable us to be more social.
• When it comes to actual blogging, take us back to our roots.

Jaime, instead of taking my word for it, went out and talked to a whole lot of our users — nearly 1,000 of you shared your feedback and insights with us. And you were not shy about your dislikes. As it turned out, most of what you wanted was already on my wish list. So we got ahold of our old friend Ryan Freitas and the ace design team of Shane Pearlman and Peter Chester to turn what we learned into a unique experience. They quietly toiled away for months and now, here you have it: The first step in the network-wide overhaul.

What we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine. We have done this by adding a Featured Posts block at the top of the home page, while toward the bottom we’ve added topic pages and special reports. The rest maintains the typical blog format, but with a focus on extreme discoverability — the most-requested feature amongst our readers.

To that end, many of you asked for a list of three bullet points that summarize the highlights of longer posts. You got it. A list of related posts was another common request, so we’ve implemented that as well. And for those of you that wanted the GigaOM Team to point to great blog posts we might have read across the web and found useful, we’re rolling out that feature later this week. It’s pretty simple — we don’t have a monopoly on ideas, and since our business is based on your attention, it’s our job to make sure that your attention is being put to good use. And that means helping you save time and finding you stuff that you might find useful.

A note about typography: I wanted us to make reading an easy experience, so I opted for white spaces, bigger fonts and some elements that you would typically see in a traditional print publication.  (We’re using the FF Clifford font, which is specially licensed through FontFont and being served using Typekit technology.)
I’ve been reading the test site on an older, smaller screen (1024 x 768 ThinkPad) and my eyes don’t hurt — yet. In addition, some of the typographic stylings come to our blog courtesy of font technologies from San Francisco-based startup Typekit. We’re using the Clifford font, which is being served using the TypeKit technology (Disclosure: Typekit and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, are backed by True Ventures, investors in GigaOM and where I am a venture partner).

In the end, I want us to be closer to my grand vision of what I see as the future of blogging — more visual, multimodal, interactive, real time and social. We’re not there just yet, but we will be in a few months. Today you can share our stories on Twitter and Facebook; you can also connect via Facebook Connect and leave comments on the site. It might come as a surprise, but this entire operation (including a fairly advanced publishing system) was built on top of WordPress.com, the on-demand blogging service based on the open-source software, WordPress. Without going into the dirty details, WordPress Jedi Mark Jaquith, our in-house coding champ Chancey Mathews and our dev team of Kelsey Damas, Nick Ohrn, Dan Cameron and Matt Wiebe and designers Reid Peifer and Brandon Jones – many of them spread across different time zones and geographies — helped us put together the whole back end for the new site (and our blog network).

Now all this design and user experience is only as good as what we are supposed to do: create content you actually want to read. On that front, too, we have some good news. Liz Gannes, who till recently was the editor of NewTeeVee, has joined the GigaOM team as senior writer, where she will closely follow consumer web technologies and startups. She will be editor-at-large for NewTeeVee, where she will be contributing her insights into the world of online video as well. Liz is going to be joining me and Stacey Higginbotham, who has also been made a senior writer for GigaOM.

Given her work ethic and deep insights, Stacey’s promotion is well deserved. She will continue to track broadband (including policy), the FCC and cloud computing. So there you have it: the GigaOM troika. We are going to be focusing on all the things we love, with a renewed emphasis on innovation. Thankfully we have our editor in chief, Sebastian Rupley, giving us his perspective on technology all the time — his experience brings a much-needed realism to the go-go nature of Silicon Valley.

This widget allows you to create a blog poll on your website.It is good if you want reader to vote on a new blog design,vote on a new widget,etc.Below is an example of the poll.The URL of the site is http://www.blogpoll.com/
Free Blog Poll

I am super excited today to feature a fabulous friend of mine Tara she owns TSG Designs.  It is the go to place for headers and buttons!  She has made several of the ones you see on this very page.  Including that awesome header at the top!!  She also designed my twitter button, the Run With Us badge, the Day Zero badge, the books that bite badge, and the the goal destroyer award badge.  She has tons of great stuff at fantastic prices.  So pretty pretty please go check out her page and get a makeover.  I want to be reading some super beautiful blogs!

The Puma Press blogs aggregation web site sports a new design for displaying the highlights of the weekly blogs posted by the journalism students at Paradise Valley Community College.

More coming, soon, on blog aggregation web sites.

Hi all, I’m in the process of changing the layout of the site and making a new header….although I don’t know if I’ll keep it….p.s. the one you see there isn’t the new one

As you can see my blog design is a little different.  I went ahead and paid for a custom CSS upgrade so  I can have the most flexibility with the design.  I’m not limited to the existing theme layouts.

I stayed home from work today so I don’t have to talk at all.  I am going to rest and not use my voice for anything, which means I won’t be doing a video log… well, maybe I will do one if I am feeling better tonight.  My coughing won’t go away unless I let my irritated throat heal, and the more I talk or use my voice, the longer that’s going to take.

I dunno what else to say at the moment.

Oh, yeah.  If you look on the side bar you’ll find a link to my old myspace blog archive.  The earliest is from Nov 10, 2005.  In 5 days that post will be exactly 4 years old.  I was thinking… it would be kind of cool to get those blogs transferred to WordPress so that they are in with the rest of my blog.  I think what I will do is copy each post’s content as a new post on the date that it was originally posted, but 4 years later.  In other words, in 5 days (november 10), I will copy the 2005 myspace blog and post it here.  One concern I have about that is that I would need a for-sure way to make it obvious that it’s an old post.  I’ll figure it out.  If you have any ideas, please share.

If any of you J.R. Giddens supporters know how to design Blog backgrounds please contact me @ egiddens07@yahoo.com. We would appreciate it! Please continue to show your love for J.R. as he grinds for valuable minutes. His hardwork wont go unnoticed. Thank You!

THEME

Choosing the WordPress theme that displays blog content in the best possible design is of primary importance.

To preview and then activate any one of over 77 themes provided by WordPress, log into WordPress, go to “My Dashboard,” then scroll down the left hand panel and open the  “Appearance” menu.

Select and click on “Themes” to preview 77 themes (the number of themes provided by WordPress as of the date of this post).

Blog Garage is now displayed in a theme that presents the posts in serif type for the body and sanserif type style for the heads.

There are thousands of themes that can be downloaded from numerous web sites. Here is a video that describes how to find, download, and install themes other than those provided by WordPress.

CUSTOMER HEADER

A photograph was chosen from the Dill photo archives and uploaded into the blog. This is accomplished using the “Custom Header” tool that appears in the “Appearance” menu.

First make or acquire a .JPG photo with dimensions of 770 wide x 200 high (pixels). Save that photo some place on the computer’s hard drive that can be easily located.

Click open the “Custom Header” tool and follow the WordPress instructions for inserting and cropping the photo.

For details about the photograph that is displayed on the Blog Garage website see the “About” page of the Blog Garage.

Thanks right, I killed it after six years of usage. www.thesmithnet.com is set to expire at the end of October. It’s the evolution of the web. As social networking increased, and free web and blog servers have grown to the capacities that anyone needs for a personal web site, there simply was no more reason to pay money to a domain host for more memory capacity than required.

The old web served a good function in its early years, before youtube, photobucket and facebook. But now it is an expensive and redundant tool. The other benefit is that all of the time administrating the web i.e. updating the software, hacking themes and the like is now gone and I only need to worry about content. The content is likely to change, probably to amplify experiences that are already posted on facebook and to provide a vehicle for storing higher quality pictures than what facebook does.

The joomla blog will become:
http://smithchristiant.wordpress.com/

and the gallery2 component for picture displays will move to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smith_christian_t