A question some of you may be thinking over the last few months is 'where did my favourite blog go to?' The simple answer is nowhere, it's still here, but there's been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make the Expert sites even more useful.
After ten years of running some of the world's most popular audio production blogs, you would think we'd sit back and take it easy, not so. There are over 12,000 pages of content, and it's easy to miss stuff or get lost, take our word for it when you have a team of top bloggers who are prolific in their output, we miss stuff sometimes written by our own team.
So we thought it was about time to do something about it, here's how.
Still Experts
Let's make one thing clear; we've not become generalists, our team is still made up of those passionate about their particular DAW, be that Pro Tools, Studio One or Logic Pro, sometimes it leads to heated debates on the team. Then there are Mac users and Windows users on the team, imagine how that goes down some days? And then there are music production and post-production specialists - depending on your point of view one lot of us has to do the tough work.
Sharing The Knowledge
With all that said we realised that a lot of our content was not DAW specific, we suppose you could call it DAW neutral. So we decided to put all of that content on the Production Expert part of the site and share it with all our communities, after all, it doesn't matter what DAW you use when there's a cool tip about recording a bass guitar or syncing to picture, and who doesn't want to see some of the gear Kevin Becka is sharing from the Blackbird Studios vaults?
People Who Love People...
And while we are talking about people, we have more new people joining the team, with around six new team members in the last few months; these include three new Logic Pro Expert writers as well as the legend Eli Krantzberg. Paul Drew is back from his gruelling stint writing music for some TV shows, and Kevin Becka joined us some time ago to share his wisdom from his role on the team at one of the world's top studios, the aforementioned Blackbird Studios in Nashville.
What's In A Name?
Enabling us to share content across different parts of our community meant bringing all the blogs into one site. So if you see part of the Pro Tools name in a page URL don't worry, it's not some secret plan to convert everyone to Pro Tools by stealth. It's just a bit of a historical anomaly we have to live with for now;; if you can get past the URL idiosyncrasy then you'll find a veritable treasure trove of content for both your favourite DAW and beyond... what's not to like?
Never Miss A Thing
We also have some smart coders working behind the scenes to help you find content more accessible, they've built a killer search engine and even done some magic so if you happen to enter a wrong URL it will try and figure out what you were looking for instead of just giving you a 404 page.
We've moved our podcast to a new platform which means it is syndicated to every top streaming service around including; iTunes, Spotify, and numerous other services.
You can find us on Apple News as well as subscribing to our RSS feeds, of course, you can also sign up to our newsletters to make sure you don't miss a thing.
Bigger And Faster
One problem facing us over the last few years was as the site got bigger it got slower (like Russ) so we've worked hard and used some of the best tools in the business to reduce load times, to about 20% of what they were a few months ago. We now work hard every day to make sure the blog doesn't grind to halt as we continue to grow. We are also using some smart measurement tools to make sure of that.
Summary
In answer to the question 'what the hell has happened to the Expert sites?' Quite a lot actually with much of it behind the scenes and all of it to ensure you get to read some of the best audio production content on the web. We know that change can be unsettling so we thought some of you would like to know what we've been up to and why.
Thanks for your continued support, you are this blog, and we do all this to ensure you get the very best from it every day!