All New Viget.com and Blogging Strategy

We last redesigned viget.com almost two years ago. As part of that effort, we launched the FourLabs blog, dedicated to sharing "insights and commentary reflecting the four key aspects of our work: strategic consulting, interactive design, application development, and online marketing." We also noted that it was "ever-evolving" and today, "it" has evolved substantially. Multiplied might be more like it.

We found over the past 22 months that writing for the FourLabs was hard because of you, frankly. Who are you? A designer? Developer? Marketer? We found our readers to be each of these, but not all of them. That made blogging tough. A post about code couldn't be too techie for fear of scaring off the design readers. A post about UX needed to define what UX is if we expected the non-UX folks to keep reading. You get the idea. A good rule for blogs is to know your audience and stay focused. We were trying to be broad ... but no more!

Today, we've launched five blogs, one for each of the four labs (strategy, design, development, and marketing) and a newly focused FourLabs blog. FourLabs is all about us - our work, our clients, our team - and is written for those who care to follow what's happening at Viget (and thank you for caring!).

Our niche blogs are all about you.

• VigetAdvance, our web strategy blog, will focus on web start-ups, new product launches, and how the web continues to transform every business.
• If you're a designer, keep up with VigetInspire and the thoughts our design team have about stuff like user experience, web standards, and Flash as well as notable site launches and events like SXSW.
• If you're a developer, we hope you'll enjoy VigetExtend and our development team talking about open source, Ruby on Rails, test driven development, and events like RailsConf.
• Marketers should check out VigetEngage, where our marketing team will share tips and ideas on search, email, and social media marketing as well as analytics.

If you think you'd kinda like to follow all four of these, no problem -- just keep keepin' up with FourLabs, where we'll have a week digest of what's covered in each, or join our email list for a monthly update.

By launching these focused blogs, our growing team here at Viget can more effectively connect with their peer communities. We can share ideas and generally contribute to the vibrant and ever-expanding industry that we're all in. And since each Lab here at Viget shares knowledge between them, we think our perspective will be a little unique. We hope you do too!

You'll notice they each have a different look, and none really look much like Viget.com or even reflect our branding. That's no accident! We'll write most of the posts (though guest bloggers are welcome) but we want the content and discussion to be about you, not us. FourLabs will continue to cover all things Viget.

Will this plan work? One blog is hard enough to keep up on -- will we be able to sustain five of them? The only thing we can promise is that we'll give it our best shot. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions!

One more thing: kudos to Rob, Doug, and Steph, who led the charge here at Viget to get all this put together while juggling plenty of client work. Internal projects are notorious for slipping, but these guys were dedicated to getting this done in time for SXSW. Nicely done!