With the redesign done, and a round of tweaks and fixes on the way, I thought I should explain how we built the site. We’re using Movable Type 3.2 as a content management system. I posted about the techniques on the Blog Business Summit and we’re using Tim Appnel’s plugin code to do it. What that means is that we have global templates that pull in chunks of content for all the pages. It also means that we can easily publish our site and focus on blogging about Clip-n-Seal and selling product.

We’re using Tim’s tags.app for tag-based navigation and archiving and an assortment of plugins. Of course, the site is all standards-based, uses sIFR 2.0 for typography and Lightbox JS. To see the light box in action, click on the size links on the size guide page.

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• Switched to Dreamhost for our web hosting
• Focused on what Clip-n-Seal is, how it works, and making it easy to buy
• Made the Amazon.com purchasing option more prominent

Finally, in our blog book, we talk extensively about how bloggy functions are being blended into websites and how a blog doesn’t have to look like one, it just has to function like one. Rising from Ruins is an example as is ErisFree and many others.

While it’d be nice to have the kind of budget to hire a hand model, that’s actually Scott Benish our designer and brand manager. I’ve known Scott for years and had no idea his hands were that nice! Inspired by George Costanza and the Puffy Shirt episode of Seinfeld, I understand Scott is considering modeling more products.

We’re getting lots of questions on what the liquid is in that bag on the home page? Is it atomic waste, Mt. Dew, what? It’s gatorade and that photo just turned out that way. We didn’t try to make it look more green or glowing, but it’s a good demo photo!

Our new site, the freshiest blog, is rolling out and should be propagated throughout the blogosphere by tomorrow. I’m excited. It’s been a long time, nearly 4 years since we first started blogging about Clip-n-Seal, and now we’re doing it even fresher, more bloggy, and we hope much easier to buy and learn about our great product.

Much work went into the design and I’ll talk about that more in a follow-up post and you’ll also hear from the designers involved. After finishing a book about blogging, it’s great to be back where it all started with this site and our bag clip.

Clip-n-Seal sales on Amazon.com have picked up recently, including favorable reviews. For our international shoppers, Amazon.com calculates the shipping automatically.

A fresher, new design is on the way