It only seems like yesterday that I posted New Blog, Who Dis but it has been nearly a month. Here I am again, moving things around. What’s up with that?
As Pani and I started food blogging, we came upon a realization. Putting virtual fashions and recipes on the same site was probably a terrible idea. It might be different if we were a massive news site. Or if we had legions of followers. But we aren’t and we don’t.
We like all those topics, and a whole lot more. But we understand that many people who like the recipes may not be interested in avatars or tutorials. Those users might be reluctant to sign up to a blog they see as ‘all over the map’ – and that’s understandable.
What Should Go Where
We considered creating an entirely new site for the food and lifestyle content, but it didn’t feel right. Pani has been using BlakOpal as her creative identity for years. Starting fresh with something that identifies less with one of her passions seemed like the opposite of what we should do.
Moving BlakOpal Designs virtual world content away from blakopal.com sounded weird too. BlakOpal Designs started long before we got into virtual worlds, but the virtual world content is why we registered the domain and built a web site (which started as a catalog or directory).
It started to make sense to move it once we realized that our BlakOpal Designs content on a web site, at least so far, has been secondary at best. Between paid and promotional items, we have sold and given away millions of outfits in virtual worlds. Yet not a single one of those sales was because someone discovered us on our web site first.
People mostly discovered us through the in-world shoppes we built, or through the respective virtual world’s marketplace. Occasionally they discovered us through a virtual fashion blog.
It Started To Make Sense
In our minds, art and technology are closely intertwined. Virtual fashions and tutorials on using technology to make art fit really nicely. While I haven’t had the trilobyte.me or trilo.org domains for that long, I have been going by that name for 20 years. This made sense.
Now comes the tedious part – moving things around. As I finish adding posts from the other site, I’ll do a little cleanup and make it easy for people to find there way over.