Welcome to the New Knoxify Experience

Credit: M.V. Jantzen

Welcome to Knoxify 2.oh my goodness! A lot of good work has taken place over the past several months to get us to this day.

Out of the gate, we’d like to give a big “we couldn’t have done this without you” to Designsensory, who took care of the design, and Michael Wender, who made it all work on the backend. We loved our old look but there was room for a lot of improvement and growth.

Rebranding Who We Are
Knoxify was hurriedly started two and a half years ago by Brandon Clarke and Casey Peters to show their friends the good things that Knoxville has to offer. The last thing to go on the site was a jagged-lettered logo that wasn’t, in any way, thought out in a professional manner. When we embarked on the overhaul with Designsensory (DS) they asked if we’d be open to rebranding the site. We told them to go for it.

Our new logo is focused on one mark, the ‘O’. A wheel design that pulls in all of our trademark colors, the ‘O’ also contains a speech bubble. Since the beginning we’ve encouraged the 30,000+ unique visitors to our site to engage each other in conversation. Now, our new look exemplifies our original and current mantra.

We love the new look and we’re not alone. Our rebranding effort won DS (and us) a Gold ADDY award.

A New Layout
By now you’ve noticed that pretty much everything is new. The logo, the content and most importantly, the layout.

Our new homepage has three speech bubbles hung from the top that draw attention to our neighborhood guides, our latest tweet and the current Knoxville weather. We’re excited about the weather addition because as any Knoxvillian knows, local weather constantly changes so it’s worthy of our front-page.

Moving down the page it becomes highly evident that we went with a magazine-styled layout for the rest of the site. Content doesn’t move terribly fast here at Knoxify so our new “feature” post style proudly displays our latest article. Below that is a grid of the six previous posts with teasers that will hopefully pique your interest. Further down is another grid highlighting nine of our most popular topics. We have a lot of content and we wanted a way to pull it forward so we’re hoping the topic matrix will help visitors do just that.

We could bore you with more text about our new layout but we’ll stop here and encourage you to dive right in and start using it. If you run across any issues please shoot us a note.

An Outlet for the Community
Since our inception we have battled the hobby vs. business aspect of the site. Knoxify is a labor of love and always has been but we had to answer the call to let our community help us monetarily. Based on feedback from our readers we will soon be adding sponsorship opportunities (banner ads, unique placements, etc.) and community text-based ads. The latter will enable our visitors to display a text-based message, no click-thru needed, for a set amount of views. A good use of this new system will be items like garage sales, etc.

Work in Progress
We wanted to get the site up as soon as possible so there are still a few items we’ve got to tackle. Bear with us as we squash all of the bugs.

Leave us a comment with your thoughts. We’re anxious to know what everyone thinks of the new look.