Good morning all,

I hope you all had a great weekend, and your week if off to an awesome start!

Last week, between meetings, podcast recordings, and working on training quotes, I made quite a bit of progress with the design of the new websites.

Phase one of the update deals with the Home Page and Individual posts. The new home page design will be full width to take advantage of widescreen monitors, and will feature three main feeds near the top of the page: News, Articles, and Videos.

To make this work I'm having to go through many of the over 1500 posts to make some changes. Right now I'm focusing on 2023 content so the new home page will have plenty of content, but over the coming months I hope to update all 1500 of them.

The second phase is News integration. I'm working on several ideas to integrate Automation.News with TheAutomationBlog.com to make things much more streamline, and reduce the work it takes to update both each day so I can bring back the morning news roundup.

The third phase is something I'm calling "Guides." An early attempt at this can be seen with my SLC-500 content, like on the following post and in the attached image: https://theautomationblog.com/the-slc-500-resetting-to-factory-defaults/

The goal is to provide the following:

(1) A "Guide" homepage for each product that we've covered extensively.

While I've created these manually as "Index" pages in the past, I'm looking for a way to automate this using the category or tag fields.

(2) A "Guide" sidebar, like on my SLC-500 posts, which link to all of the content on the same topic

(3) And in the future I also want to produce and sell eGuide PDF compilations of all the related articles made available for only $4.99 each.

As far as progress, I'm hoping to complete Phase 1 in the next few days, after which I'll begin working on Phase 2. Once that is done I'll need to step back and decide which comes next - phase 3 or resuming the morning show - at this point I think it would be best to complete parts 1 and 2 of phase 3 prior to relaunching the news show since that show consumers so much of each day.

Aside from working on the websites, I also have a whopping 7 podcasts already recorded that now need editing, so in between running the company and working on the updated sites, I'll also be working on getting those edited, uploaded, and scheduled for publication.

And that's what I'm working on. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to post them below, and thanks again to everyone who is a full member here supporting my work!

Have a great day,

Shawn Tierney