I am so excited and happy to welcome you to the new Chief Family Officer – it looks a lot different, doesn’t it?

Thank you so much to Adam Koford for the fabulous new logo, Amy of Blogging with Amy who set me up with WordPress, Joy of Five J’s Designs who handled the monster migration, and Nancy Dorsner of web design site Dabbled Studios for helping me wrap my brain around the structure of the WordPress template so I could get started. They are all fantastic and talented people who are very easy to work with!

It’s actually been a lot of fun setting up this site. I’d been on Blogger for so many years that learning my way around backstage here was overwhelming at first. But after I tweaked one little thing, and then another, and started figuring things out here, it’s been a blast. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to really stretch and learn something totally new!

Of course, the most important question for you is: How do I get around?

The biggest change is the menu bar up there underneath the new logo. The menu gives you quick links to Drugstore Game and Ralphs deals, coupon links, and more. There’s also a handy search bar up at the top right – it might need some time to work right with Google crawlers and all that, so bear with me.

For the time being, I’ve added the “Categories” widget to the right so you can search for something that way. I’ll try to figure out how to winnow that list down to the most used as it’s rather unwieldy at the moment.

I’ll be making changes like that over the next few weeks, refining things as I see what works and what doesn’t. If you come across something that you like, don’t like, or is broken, please be sure to let me know.

As always, thank you for reading Chief Family Officer!

I have been thinking for literally years now that I should move this site over to WordPress. Blogger has been good and easy to use, but they’ve shut down some of my favorite sites without warning and they’ve shut down themselves unexpectedly a couple of times earlier this year.

So when Blogging with Amy ran a series on moving from Blogger to WordPress, I read every word. And I was really struck by this paragraph in Part 2 on why one should make the move to WordPress:

If [you] have seriously considered making a move to WordPress in the past. (If you have thought about it previously, chances are you’ll think about it again. It is definitely better to do it sooner rather than later.)

I knew Amy was right – I kept thinking about it, and I was going to keep thinking about it, so I might as well do it already.

And then Amy and Joy of Five J’s Design offered a migration deal. It seemed like a sign. So I signed up.

And it’s happening.

Tomorrow. (Yikes!)

What does that mean for you?

Hopefully (if all goes smoothly), bigger and better things at CFO. There will be a new design, a new logo, better navigation, and more resources. I’m optimistic that things will go smoothly and email and RSS subscribers won’t notice anything amiss.

The site will be down for a few hours on Saturday afternoon/evening, and I won’t be posting from noon Saturday until Sunday morning. You will be able to find me over on Facebook – I’ll post deals and updates there, since CFO will be inaccessible.

When the new site is live, I’ll hope you’ll take it for a test drive and let me know what you think – what you like, what you don’t like, and especially, if anything is broken.

As always, thank you for reading Chief Family Officer!

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really used Facebook because I’ve got some privacy/trust concerns given their past performance. But I also thought it was high time for a CFO Facebook page. That way, those of you who don’t like RSS feeds and/or forget to visit the actual site can get updates on the latest deals via your own Facebook news feed.

The best thing about the Facebook page is that it’s a fast and easy way for me to update you on individual deals that pop up throughout the day and look like they’re going to be shortlived – in other words, deals that probably aren’t going to make it to Morning Coffee the following day. I’ve been using Twitter for such updates but I’m guessing that Facebook will be a lot more convenient for many of you.

I’ll be working on the page for the next few weeks, setting up new tabs and making other modifications. So check it out, “like” the page to get updates in your news feed, and let me know what else you’d like to see on the Facebook page!

As I mentioned last week, I picked up a Motorola Droidfrom Amazon for the unbelievably low price of $49.99. I needed a new phone anyway, because the camera on my old one stopped working and there’ve been more than a handful of times when I couldn’t take a cute picture of the boys on the spur of the moment. The data plan is $29.99 per month, which doesn’t seem too unreasonable for unlimited access to the web when I’m on the go, although I may change my mind when I see the next phone bill.

But more importantly, what does my new phone mean for you?

It means I’m tweeting more to share deals that will probably be gone by the time of the next Coffee post. Especially Swag Codes – if I see that there’s a code out, it’s now easy for me to tweet a quick alert. (Unless Twitter is “over capacity” as it was this afternoon when I tried for over ten minutes to retweet Swag Bucks to let you know about a code.)

I’ll also take another crack at setting up a CFO Facebook page so we can all interact a little more. I’ll let you know when/if there’s more news on that.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Droid changes anything else about the way I blog. I can’t access Blogger on it, so even though I downloaded an app for that, I can’t blog on it the way I would at home. And there have been a couple of instances where I’ve wanted to hurl the phone out the window but Marc said I had to get a case for it first. I don’t love everything about it, but now that I’ve got a little perspective, I can see that part of my frustration is simply due to a learning curve. Which is brought on in part by the fact that the Droid comes with the worst manual ever written. Couldn’t they at least have put one online with the basics, like how to cut and paste and how to delete icons on the desktop? Is it still a desktop if it’s on a phone? Okay, I’ll stop rambling now and just say . . .

Click here to follow me on Twitter.

Disclosure: I’m an Amazon affiliate, so any purchase you make after entering Amazon through a link on Chief Family Officer supports this site at no additional cost to you. Thank you!