OHC will be making some changes.  The changes involve a brand new name and a new home on the web.  As you know, I started school earlier this year to become a certified health coach.  With that comes a brand new career and life path.

I debated long and hard about keeping OHC or developing a new company name.  I had many many people tell me to keep OHC because they liked it and thought the name was cute and catchy.  I have to agree, I love Off Her Cork very much.

I’ve spent over two years building up OHC and creating life for it.  To possibly have to give that up was a very hard decision.  Not to mention migrating everything over to a new site, having to rebuild google rank, and rebuild the brand.  Whew! I’m tired just writing that.

Seriously though, this is a decision that kept me up at night. What should I do?  Do I keep OHC or move to something new?  Some people told me to have a new site just for business and OHC for personal.

I could do that but it would take a lot of work to maintain.  Plus, trying to establish yourself is a lot easier if everything is under one name.  Think of The Pioneer Woman, if you want to read all of her different blog categories, you don’t go to different websites, right? It’s all on one site with different sections.

Since I am basically in the midst of a fresh start, I realized that everything should be new. This ultimately led to my final decision of moving everything over to a brand new site.  I hope to launch the site soon!  Which of course will still be under going some changes and may look a little wonky for a bit but please hang with me during that time.

Everything from OHC will be at the new place.  All of my previous posts will be there as well.  Nothing is getting left behind. It’s just going to take a while to get things set up.

In the mean time, OHC will be taking a short break while I work on getting the new site together.  As soon as the new site is ready for viewing, I’ll give you a heads up and you will be able to check it out.

Stay tuned!

Hi guys!  I’ve been thinking a lot about OHC lately and what I would like for it to become and what I would like to talk about.  I’m sort of leaning away from the daily eats posts.  Mostly because I don’t really have that much to talk about in regards to the minutia of my day.  I ate, I walked Rocky, and I ate some more.  The end.

Snore fest.

And I’m just not really feeling those posts anymore.  Part of the reason is that I also don’t want to bring in discussion topics in those posts.  For me personally, I feel like discussion worthy topics should get their own posts to highlight them.  I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else but me. :p  I am very much a compartmentalized type of personality.  I like things to be neat and orderly.  Things that are worth a big “discussion” should be in their own category while what I ate for lunch should be in its own category.  Because of that mentality, my daily eats posts are full of nothing.  The content is not there and I’m not feeling happy with them.  Therefore I want to maybe put them away for a little while and focus on some other things.

What I would like to do is talk about varying topics in regards to food.  I want to have more time to focus on Tips and Reviews but also recipes and my training.  I’m thinking of putting up a weekly training post instead of daily.  I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, mostly I’m trying to feel my way through and discover what works and what I like doing.

Rose said something in a post the other day that a reader described her blog as a Life Blog with a food emphasis.  This is what I would like OHC to be.  I want it to be a Life Blog discussing lots of things with an emphasis on food and exercise.  Where along with silly little life stories there are recipes and food reviews and so on.  The OHC tagline is “Food, wine, running, life…” And I really should be sticking with that more I think.  Right now I’m not feeling like my blog fits that tagline.

My daily eats posts were for me in the very beginning.  They helped me keep track of what I was eating and work through my food issues so I could figure out what works for me and what does not.  I’m now at a point where I’m pretty confident in my food choices and with knowing my body.  For a while I kept them going because I thought that other people liked them and/or could benefit from them.  However, now as I write them, I know there is nothing substantial there.  The content isn’t good, or let me rephrase, I’m not happy with the content and therefore I don’t feel happy when I publish it.  I feel like I’m writing it just to get it done and up.

That’s not really okay with me.  Like some other bloggers, I would rather have quality over quanity here at OHC.  I’ve got standards!

I’m just giving you a heads up in case you’re wondering why all of the sudden I’m just blabbing away instead of talking to you about smoothies.  Of course Pizza Thursday will always get talked about because OHC started it and it’s exciting!

I hope that you will stick around but I understand if you don’t because the new content isn’t your thing.  Feedback is always welcome!

Hi guys!  OHC is officially over a year old!  We celebrated one year of OHC goodness on the 1st of September.  Hooray!  The past year we have talked about so many things!

I’ve been blogging my daily eats.

I’ve been providing tips.

I’ve been writing food reviews.

I’ve started doing some other exercise and nutrition discussion.

And basically just talking about life in general.

This past year has been rewarding and challenging in so many different ways.  In this year I have also made some discoveries and have come to some conclusions that I would like to share with you.

First up is the daily eats section.  Daily eats is hard, yo!  It’s not taking the pictures that’s hard, it’s dealing with those pictures and writing the post that is hard and time consuming.  One thing you might have already noticed is that I’ve started posting once a day now, in the evenings, instead of two posts a day.  Two posts a day was stressing me out.  Sometimes I would be in the middle of something and I would have to stop in order to have the time to get my afternoon post up.  It takes me at least a half an hour to write a daily eats post and that’s if I do it quickly.  Most times it takes me much longer.

I personally have a hard time keeping up with blogs that post more than once a day.  I have specific times that I can read and comment.  It’s not everyday although I wish it could be.  Just know that I’m still reading your blogs even if I haven’t commented in a while! Sometimes I don’t have anything to add to the conversation.   Anyway, my point is, when I finally have a chance to sit down to read blogs and see that one blog might have 25 posts for me to catch up on, that becomes a little overwhelming.  If it’s overwhelming for me, it’s possible that it’s overwhelming for others.  Because of that and because sometimes it is hard for me to find the time in the afternoon to do a post, I’ve started doing daily eats posts once a day and writing an entry about the whole day as opposed to in parts.

I have also started posting mostly about my dinners because my breakfast and lunches are the same the majority of the time.  I will be creating a OHC Fuel page discussing how I stuff mah face, feed and fuel this gorg bod I’m rockin’.  When breakfast and lunch is different, I’ll share it.  I will probably still talk about my smoothies in detail though since I love them and they are something that I consider to be unique.  Omitting the breakfast and lunch portion of the daily eats will free up more time for me to talk about exercise or whatever topic I’m thinking about that day.

I’m also taking a more laid-back approach to posting.  If for some reason, I can’t get to a post that day and it moves over to the next day, no big deal.  I used to stress about this a lot and wonder if delaying posting was costing me readership.  What I’ve realized is that people are either going to like my blog or not.  If they like what I have to say and my style, then when I post is not a big deal.  I’m still getting used to allowing myself the ability to put off a post until the next day but it has happened before and I’m okay with that.

And also, in regards to tips and reviews, I am still going to do these posts because I enjoy them a lot.  However, if there is a week where I don’t get one up or maybe I don’t have anything lined up for that week, then it won’t go up or maybe I’ll talk about something else.   This has happened a few times already and nothing catastrophic has resulted because of it.  There are a lot of things I want to talk about and discuss but sometimes there isn’t enough days in the week to post everything! :p  So you might see a tip and review that week or you may not, it might be replaced with something else.  Cool?

And last but not least, OHC has a new look! If you’re using a reader, please click through and check me out.   Everything is now on the front page for easier access and reading.  I think with the style before people didn’t understand I had multiple sections and not everything was found on the front page.  Hopefully this should make navigation easier.  The design is still a work in progress and I’m working on additional tabs to provide more information about me and the website.

Here’s a screenshot of how the new design is supposed to look.  Just an FYI, but the site is designed with Firefox and Safari in mind, so it will probably look different with Internet Explorer.  If it looks seriously different, please give me a heads up so I know what to tell Scott.   If you are seeing weird issues and are using Firefox or Safari, let me know what those are!

Hooray for 2010 and a brand new year at OHC!