In the upcoming weeks, you may notice some changes if you frequent these pages. There is no need to worry if you enjoy reading my blog: I am not going to quit publishing reviews and interviews – quite the contrary – and it will remain my one-man project. Well, I might enlist some help from able friends if I keep running into walls with certain things, but ideally, that should only have a positive effect on the results.

By the time this post is published, I have made the switch to a paid WordPress plan, rather than the free plan these pages have been operating on for the last eleven and a half years. There are several reasons for this, that I will go into later in this post for those who are interested, but it is part of an effort to try and professionalize my Kevy Metal blog. I have always taken writing for this blog very seriously, and I try to apply my journalistic skills just as professionally as I do for my paid magazine work, and I have been thinking for a while now that other aspects of the site should reflect that as well.

While these ideas have been forming for a while, the increased number of interviews on the site, as well as my desire to publish more of those consistently, have given me the final push to actually give it a try. Let me share some of my plans with you, so you know what to expect.

What’s Going to Change?

The first thing you may have noticed is that the site has gone ad-free. This may sound like a strange decision for someone on a below-modal income who just switched to a paid WordPress plan. Another option would have been to monetize the site, but some of the ad campaigns that ran on WordPress have rubbed me the wrong way lately, and their ad platform doesn’t allow users to select which ads are shown and which are not. No ads at all was really the only option for me. I have been looking into affiliate marketing recently, and affiliate links are likely to be included in the near future, but that is not at the top of my priority list at the moment.

An important part of my professionalization strategy – for lack of a better term – is to make the site look better. I have been fully content with the monochrome template that I have been using since the beginning, but I want these pages to start looking like an actual website. Despite having studied editorial design for a full semester at the School for Journalism – and thoroughly enjoying it – this really isn’t my area of expertise, though I have fairly clear ideas of what it should be like. Fortunately, I know people who are quite talented designers, such as my friend Yuki at Arlequin Magazine, who has already offered to help me out when needed and for starters helped me design the logo that now heads the site. I’m also looking at a different menu and category structure.

Most importantly, my main goal is to publish more interviews. Even though there have been more than usual already in the last few months, my recent interview with Brittney Hayes really serves as the launch of this intention. Of course, the number of interviews I can arrange and publish depends on availability and whether or not press agencies are willing to work with this blog – no hard feelings if not, by the way. But more interviews is always a good purpose, in my opinion.

What’s NOT Going to Change?

When it comes to the actual content, I am fully intending my Kevy Metal blog to remain what it has always been. There will still be an Album of the Week review every Sunday, and I will probably keep writing those right before publishing them instead of planning them ahead. That’s how it has been for over eleven years. It will always be my goal to publish interviews with information that you may not have read anywhere else. And even though I am going after slightly bigger artists these days, there will always be a place for smaller or up-and-coming bands whose music I like.

My day job is at an e-commerce company, and I know various people who work in the field of online marketing. Many of them have pointed out that it is a really bad idea to have every post I publish sent in its entirity to the subscribers of my blog. One of them recently asked why I don’t change that. The answer is simple: I don’t want to. Of course I realize the value of clicks in online marketing, but I see this site as a vehicle for long-form content that is primarily intended to be read by people with a reasonably deep interest in the subject matter. It does not matter to me at all whether that is in the newsletter or by actually visiting the site.

The variety in genres will also remain. While my interview requests mainly concern rock and metal artists, and – let’s say – jazz musicians or pop singers might be weirded out being interviewed by a medium called Kevy Metal, my musical tastes are reasonably broad and this site will always reflect that.

Please Bear With Me

The whole thing will be a work in progress over the upcoming weeks or months. Some things might go wrong, and I might mess up things in a way that will make the site an eyesore for a little while. Please bear with me. I promise you that these pages will eventually be better than they were before.

Thanks a lot to anyone who made it this far. The fact that you are interested enough to read the whole thing means a lot to me.