Today we're very excited to roll out not only a complete, bottoms up redesign of Don't Quit Your Day Job... but also to introduce you to a brand new domain name: dqydj.com.
Seven years into running this site, we were presented with the opportunity of a (website) lifetime: the chance to buy the dot com for our site, dqydj.net.
Up until this point, we'd been the odd ones out - one of the few financial self-hosted websites or blogs still rocking a '.net' in your address bar, and still getting a significant amount of traffic from people searching for 'dqydj.com' on Google.
Those hilarious search terms aside, we're very happy to finally have everything in place: the domain name, this major redesign, the new server infrastructure, and Transport Layer Security by default:
An All New Design and a Slightly Tweaked Brand
As you can see, we've gone back to basics on the redesign, and we've changed some of our branding.
Obviously, the first is the .com: update your bookmarks, and if you email either of us on the '.net' server please switch to '.com'. (We'll still keep the '.net', we just don't want you bouncing and redirecting and being slowed down!)
Second, here is our new logo:
Third, we've moved our Twitter account to the new handle '@DQYDJHQ'; we will no longer have the '@dqydj_net' account. Please follow us on the new account! (You can find me in the same place, '@dataPK').
DQYDJ's Brand New Infrastructure: Built for Speed
If you have followed the travails of the site over the last month, you'll know that we (finally) switched from shared hosting to a VPS. We obviously waited too long - traffic immediately increased by a couple thousand pageviews a day - so we apologize for the poor performance through March.
Although I had hoped to move servers and switch domains concurrently, I'm happy with how it turned out in the end after the double effort:
Performance of the New Page from the Dallas Pingdom Site. (This is before the ads - but you can still see the performance difference... and pre-VPS we would take 7-10 seconds sometimes!)
Here are the speed-related details of the new infrastructure:
- VPS from Webfaction
- Nginx Web Server
- PHP-FPM
- WordPress
- Autoptimize for JS/CSS/HTML minimization
Our New Design: Embracing Open Spaces
While we can't go completely ad-free (do you want us to have donation drives?), we wanted to embrace the open space with this design - on both desktop and mobile.
We have embraced readability through larger font sizes, larger line spaces, a white background and a nicely contrasting text color. This design allows less characters per line than the old one, while still allowing our unique features (such as our calculators) to fit.
We started with the Genesis theme Eleven40, and heavily modified it into what you see today. On splash pages such as our homepage and our about page, I used Twitter's famous front end framework Bootstrap extensively to create all of the responsive features.
We'd like to call out a few fun features we added as well:
Starting on our home page, you'll see a section where we feature some of our most popular content. It updates roughly every hour.
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On Our Sidebar, you can also find a more limited selection of featured posts, which is random per article:
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Also On Our Sidebar, you'll also find a new trending article feature. Every night at midnight (Pacific), we calculate which articles have seen the largest boost in traffic over the last 7 days - so you can read our buzz-worthy articles and see what your peers are viewing:
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Also On Our Sidebar, you'll find a popular posts section which lists the most popular posts over the last week. It, too, updates at around midnight Pacific with the newest pageview count over the last week.
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The rest of the fun features? You'll have to find them. We also hope to add a few more discovery based features to help you better mine the depths of our nearly 1000 post archives for gems you haven't found yet!
DQYDJ's Mission Hasn't Changed: Finding The Story Behind the Story
As for our mission, it hasn't changed.
While we'll continue to tweak the design to see how you like it best, you can expect us to concentrate on what we do best: writing expansive features, doing extensive research, and creating exclusive and unique tools. And yes: the recent calculator drought will soon be over.
This new design should free us to work on our core competency - creating useful content - without layout getting in the way. We hope that the enhanced readability and the new easier-to-remember domain name make it easier to help you seize control of your finances and give you the confidence you need to make the right financial decisions. Please let us know anything we can do to help you along on your journey, and always feel free to suggest areas of study and calculator topics!
We'll continue to provide the arguments and present the data - and we thank you for being a loyal reader. Now back to our regularly scheduled articles!
Thank You,
-PK and Cameron
Don't Quit Your Day Job...
I should mention, Cameron and I are both available for consulting - get in touch on our about page.
