Episode 700 and The Biggest Lesson Learned With a Rebrand

BobWP:
Hey BobWP here and well, here we are, episode 700. Looking back from this point in time, we’ve had 565 guests. Many have joined us a few times, in case you were not aware of this. Also, you can find the meta of guest names here and there on the site and if you click on that, you’ll actually see that each guest has their own archive. Also, during that same time, up to 700 episodes, we’ve had 39 hosts, a variety of voices and personalities that gave their time to talk to the community. And of course we have our sponsors and partners, which I can say roughly has been around 30 companies over these last 700 episodes that supported us over the years, some of which have or continue to support us with multiple years.

Now, I wish I could share the number of hours, the number of words have been included in our transcripts, but hey, I imagine AI could probably do something. But for the time being, let’s just say it’s a lot. And yes, we do have transcripts for every single show, all 700 of them. Now in the previous episode I talked about the episodes where I come in and update you on things here at Open Channels fm, just like this one anyway, without having to repeat myself. If you want to get a little bit more into that, you can listen to the last one. If you haven’t. But since the last update on our rebranding, I’ve been putting off doing another one. And it’s merely because of the fact that we’re still in the process of finalizing a few things.

So moving forward, you’ll find side updates news around our channel strictly in the form of blog posts. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be interjected somewhere, sometime in a conversation that just won’t be me.

So let’s talk about what I call the semi update going to keep it simple. Around the end of April. Yes, that is when it happened. We worked towards the major rebrand of do the Woo to open channels FM. We announced it at WordCamp Europe in early June and the only thing that really has stuck was a new name. Since then, I’ve restructured the site and our channels three to four times, including redoing featured images, content, taxonomies, etc. Etc. All that good stuff. I think the biggest lesson I learned, and I knew maybe I didn’t learn it, but it’s been a while, is that rebranding is not an easy task. Now, this hasn’t been the first time I’ve done major rebrand. We did it from our marketing design company to the brand Bob WP in 2010, which was rather a large move and again took some time going through the process and several other things we’ve done or changed I consider more as pivots, but this one has had a lot of touch points than anything we’ve done in the past. And each iteration, whether it’s visually or structurally or anything between, I’m finding it. Well, yeah, it throws off things a bit and that often happens because you get hit with a better idea. But to be honest, during this time it has also helped me to think out and yes, put in place better implementations of our workflow, the site itself, our hosts, and even sustainability.

Let me give you one example just to kind of show you what’s been going on. The process has led me to redoing about 1800 featured images one by one in Canva. Now I know you’re probably already shaking your head, but automation AI as far as why I did this, let’s just say that restructuring things have been the culprit behind that. Now the fact is I could never had made it better without going through all of this. I would have never visualized or thought about a process and rebranding if I had not done all these iterations because something didn’t work. So when you look at this example of redoing and redoing and redoing featured images, yes, you may still be shaking your head at that. It was not a waste of time, not at all, as I never would have gotten to where I am without having done that.

Now this may sound a bit convoluted, but as we get closer it will become more obvious as far as actually finishing up the total rebrand. Now, when I say the word closer, there are still quite a few things that need to be thought through and finalize. Two of them are quite significant and will help us decide the direction. Also, before we really share with you what we have done, you know, getting down to more of the specifics, I want to make sure we have a few more things buttoned up and I want to make sure I don’t end up doing, or should I say redoing featured images again? No, I think I’m good on that. Finally took me a few times but I got that down.

Now this takes me to the fact that we are shooting for year end as we kick off into 2026. Of course, in the meantime we are moving right along business as usual. Now I’d like to encourage you if you listen to our podcasts or our episodes through your favorite pod app. Take a moment to check out what we have been doing on the site over at Open Channels fm. Might give you a better idea of what we’ve been up to, maybe give you some hints to where we’re going. So as promised, you won’t be hearing these Bob, only episodes moving forward as I wrangle some guests and co host to join me for some conversations.

And now, most importantly, I’d like to thank you all, our listeners getting us to number 700. You know we’re doing this for you and yeah, really can’t thank you enough for carving some time in your busy life to join us on occasion. We have a lot of interesting conversations yet to come, so hoping you’ll continue to hang out with us. And of course our guests, our hosts and our sponsors, they’re kind of the lifeblood that keeps us going here. And especially when it comes to sponsors, they not only keep the lights on, They’ve made these 700 episodes possible in so many different ways.

Speaking of sponsors, I’d like to give a special shout out to our current sponsors, Woo GoDaddy and Omnisend for being here at the 700 mark and taking this into the next. Well, 100, 200, 300, whatever, you know, I’m being optimistic here. Well, if you want to keep up on all things, including our post updates on the rebrand, I would suggest you subscribe to our newsletter or, you know, the content we send out drops into your inbox as it’s published and we’ll kind of keep you on top of all things. Plus you get to hear all those great conversations.

I was thinking of what should I do to close this out? And so had this thought, go ask ChatGPT. Because you know, my brain isn’t filled with everything in history. If there was anything significant that was techie geeky in the history of the Internet around the number 700, they gave me several different ones and some of them were like, I don’t know, you know, and some of them didn’t really kind of make sense to me. And maybe this one, you know, I’m trying to think back to way back because this actually happened a year after I was graduating from high school. So I don’t think I was paying much attention to this. So anyway, they said that RFC numbers in the 700s. In 1976, Internet Engineering Task Force released RFC 700 titled Protocols for the ARPA Network. It helped shape the early Internet’s backbone, literally paving the way for the open web. We rely on today. Cool. Well, with that said, thanks for listening, and until the next time.