The new name, “Social Media PR Blog” reflects a new direction at EndGame PR. Actually, I don’t want to call it a new *direction*, because EndGame PR is still quite good at media relations and SEO PR. However, in the past three years since the company was founded, a lot of changes have happened both in the world of PR and in EndGame PR. Social media has crashed the party, and I’ve rushed up to meet it. Smart clients are coming to me with a desire to learn about and utilize the new tools available in the social media world … things like blogging, podcasting, web videos, Facebook, and Twitter. In fact, an extremely large percentage of the work I do is social media related. I think social media is a PR practice and I’ve started calling EndGame PR a Social Media PR firm.  Thus … the name of the blog.

Will the focus of the blog change?  Not much.  I already blog about social media quite a bit already, so you probably won’t notice a difference in the content.  One thing that WILL need to change is the address of the blog feed, which is at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/media-relations-seo-pr-blog.  I’ll be changing the URL in the near future to reflect the change.  I’m not doing it yet, but be aware that it’s coming!

PS: I’m not quite satisfied with the graphic on the masthead, and will probably work on that a bit more.

If I’m not mistaken, this post should be showing up over there right now.  Hi RVABlogs readers!

Sorry for the problem.  It’s just one more issue I’m clearing up with the new web design!  Here are links to all of the various EndGame PR feeds:

Media Relations & SEO Blog Posts
EndGame PR News Releases
Startup BizCast Podcast Episodes

1. This website hadn’t had a true redesign in about two years.  That’s an eternity on the Internet.
2. The original design was done in standard html with no stylesheet.  That means it was a bear to update.  This design is managed using WordPress as a content management system, or CMS.

This design is an improvement over the previous site for several reasons.  First, it’s easier to manage.  Second, content is organized much better because it’s all on the same platform and the front page is a much better design than I had previously.

I’m going to write a post about using WordPress as a CMS in the near future, because it’s very exciting.  For now, however, I’m still working on completely finishing everything on endgamepr.com.  I apologize if you find a loose board or dusty corner here and there, as it’s quite an undertaking to port over a several hundred page site (including news releases).  I hope you enjoy the design, and I encourage your feedback!

[Updated 8/9: I'm continuing to tinker with the design and functionality of the site. One of the main things I'm doing is trying to automate things that I had to do by hand with my html version. The news archives page now updates as soon as a new release is posted. Unfortunately I'm having trouble getting my news page and the news headlines on the front page to do that. WordPress is a great CMS, but it isn't perfect. There's no good way to work with pages like that. If I were to post all of my client news releases on this blog, it would solve the problem, but I really don't want to clog up the blog like that. For now, I have to update those two sections by hand.

Another thing I've done is worked to shorten up the copy on each page of the site, to more closely match the available "white space". I'm quite pleased with my expertise page. I replaced the descriptions of each EndGame PR capability with a small pop up that has that description. As a result, the page is merely a list, but I don't lose the descriptions that some people need.]

[Updated 8/6: The site is more or less completed now. I'm doing some tweaking and trying to figure out how to automate some of the things I had to do by hand on my old html-based website. Now that the database issue is behind me, I'm absolutely loving WordPress as a CMS]

[Updated 8/5: Due to massive slowdowns and database errors, I took the drastic step today of deleting the WordPress database, uninstalling WordPress, and then re-installing everything.  The site is running like a CHAMP now!  I just added what I think might be the last page -- the video podcast client samples page.  I'm going to run through my old site files and see if there's anything I missed.  If not, I can finally remove the "under construction" sign and fully open the site for business!]