The old Armadillo Blog has been rather quiet the past comple of months, as I put some of the finishing touches on a massive redesign of our web site and the finishing touches on a couple of campaign sites for the upcoming civic election in Calgary. In the meantime, I figured it would be good to do a dual post to catch-up with two really cool personal blog redesigns that were launched over the past two months for two incredibly smart entrepreneurs. Those sites of course are the redesign of “Leah Lawrence’s personal blog”:http://www.leahlawrence.ca/ and the redesign of Sarah Blue’s Get Mommy Some Gin. (Read More…)

“Mike’s Bloggity Blog”:http://mikesbloggityblog.com is easily one of the most popular Entertainment blogs in Canada. Winning numerous awards for his posts covering the ever growing Canadian television and pop-culture landscape, Mike’s Bloggity Blog reaches more than 20,000 readers a month. (and growing)

Earlier last year, we had the fantastic opportunity to work with Mike on the first redesign of his site. It was the first step in the site’s continuous evolution, one in which the site transitioned over from it’s humble roots at Blogger.com to a self-hosted professional entity. And now this week, we’re happy to showcase the second iteration of Mike’s Bloggity and a new era for this fantastic site.

(Read More…)

We just wanted to send a congratulatory note to our good friend Mike Morrison of Mike’s Bloggity Blog for being named the “Best Calgary Blog in Fast Forward’s Best of 2010 poll”:http://mikesbloggityblog.com/2010/06/bloggity-named-best-in-calgary.html.

We kinda feel like that proud cousin (or high school friend) that watches their multi-talented friend make it big.

So a big virtual HIGH-FIVE goes out to Mike.

Congratulations.

It’s with great pleasure that we get to announce our latest project, the redesign of “Mike’s Bloggity Blog”:http://www.mikesbloggityblog.com.

For those unfamiliar with this popular site, Mike’s Bloggity Blog is one of Canada’s most visited entertainment blogs. Consecutively rated as the best entertainment blog in Canada for the past three years, Mike is a witty and persistent blogger with over two and half thousands post of valuable entertainment goodness.

He covers all aspects of the Canadian Entertainment realm, from the latest news on CBC’s smash hit _Being Erica_ to the latest in Canadian Films to the Junos. Mike’s Bloggity Blog is slowly becoming the go to place for everything related to the Canadian Entertainment industry.

Mike approached us earlier this year with a goal to take his *Blogger* hosted site to the next level. He wanted to roll out a unique and professional design, but to also keep the lighthearted aesthetic of the original site.

So, we set about designing a new layout which would push Mike’s Bloggity Blog to the next step. We created a new colour scheme which also leveraged a bright new header, but also incorporated Mike’s trademark Wordle logo. We upgraded the sidebar to make it easier for users to connect with Mike’s Bloggity Blog through other social media networks like _Twitter_, _Google Friends_, _TweetMeme_ and his own _YouTube Channel_.

We also equipped Mike’s Bloggity Blog with a fabulous new fat footer, which enhances the user experience by allowing for easier navigation and allowing users to discover some of Mike’s other writing gigs.

The biggest challenge for this project was the transition from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress web site. But after some data wrangling, an unexpected downtime with a web hosting provider and some very useful WordPress plug-ins; we were able to transition all 2,500 posts from the original Mike’s Bloggity Blog to the new site, without any damage to the existing Search Engine results.

So with that we are happy to announce the new redesign for Mike and wish him all the best in his quest to conquer the _Canadian Entertainment Industry_!