Our New Home
I am so excited about sharing our new (online) home with you today! I have been working behind the scenes with the oh-so-talented Emily Hagger of Anthem Design Lab for the past few months. I came to Emily with a specific concept I was hoping to achieve and her friendly, collaborative manner combined with her wonderful sense of design and aesthetic helped to make Playful Learning’s new website come alive in a way that was beyond what I had imagined.
It has been a long process that started back in January. I knew I wanted to incorporate photographs of items that we use on a regular basis. In order to accomplish this I packaged up our favorite art supplies, rulers, alphabet charts, and even some of our most beloved treasures found on nature walks and sent them off to Canada where Emily lives and works. When she received the items she went to work taking a variety of amazing photographs and the design process came to life.
While the design was coming together beautifully, I knew I had one major hurdle to overcome. Transferring my 300+ posts from the iWeb platform over to WordPress. Now, this hurdle had nothing to do with Emily’s work and everything to do with the limitations of iWeb (which is why I made this switch). This process was way more challenging then I had hoped… While some of my posts came over successfully, I still needed to go through each and everyone to re-upload photos (Hmmm? Where is that photo from 2009?), update links, and at times copy and paste text. While I am happy to say that the majority of Playful Learning posts are in tact and indexed on our Playful Learning Experiences page, there were a couple of notable losses.
First and foremost is that all of your thoughtful comments from throughout the years, could not be transferred over. They are stored on Mobile Me, which is being discontinued. So, while the posts are there (Yeah!), they seem bare without all of your ideas, links, and words of encouragement. It would mean a lot to me and to other readers if over time when you revisit different posts you could sprinkle your words of wisdom! On a more minor note, the amazon and product links from past posts did not make it onto the new site either. Please rest assured that future posts will continue to have links to recommended books and products.
Another important detail that Emily and her team took care of was to redirected every link from the previous site, which was playfulearning.com, to the new address which is, playfullearning.net, in order to preserve all of the generous links that people have shared on their websites over the years.
While there was a lot of productive work going on behind the scenes for the past few months, I am thrilled to be back and look forward to sharing some of the fun projects we have been working on and upcoming opportunities for online learning at our new Playful Learning Ecademy.
So please take your time, look around, and let us know what you think… We are so glad that you are here!
Mariah
@playfullearning
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What a beautiful job you all have done! I LOVE the look. You should be very proud.
I can’t wait to look around some more, but just wanted to share a couple words of encouragement with you before I did. 
Thank you so much Sheri! I am really excited about getting settled in here…
Congratulations Mariah! I love the new look – everything looks beautiful!
Thanks Laura!
The new site looks amazing. It’s a shame that it was so involved, but it looks like it was worth it!
Thanks Samantha! It was involved… now that it is done, I am so glad that I did it. BTW – I love your indoor tent!
Lovely site Mariah. Simple and elegant, very easy to navigate.
Hi Barb – I hope all is well with you and your family. Thank you for your feedback, it is very helpful!
A very beautiful site you have here. I was missing your posts! It is amazing, isn’t it? All the behind-the-scenes work that goes into transferring a website. I recently reworked all of my personal pictures and copied them to a hard-drive, losing ALL of the ones on my blog that I had, over the years, uploaded via blog from Picasa…I knew I couldn’t even remember all of them (didn’t have a hard copy of the blog, either!) and I just had to let it go! A bummer that I didn’t make one of those ‘blurb books’ beforehand, but oh well. I kind of just shrugged my shoulders and ate some chocolate! :)
Can’t wait to see more posts,
Sarah M
Thanks Sarah! I have really missed posting here as well… It will be so nice to turn my attention to doing fun projects and sharing them again.
I agree, sometimes we just have to let things go…
Thank you for your comment.
Simply gorgeous! Can’t wait to watch this wonderful space grow…
Congratulations for this new web page. It looks beautiful, balanced. It is well-structured and easy to explore.
Thanks for being an inspiration.
so excited to have you back Mariah. the new site looks wonderful, such a clean and fresh look. well done!
looking forward to the new class ‘social and emotional learning’ and visiting this site often.
Im so pleased! I only recently found your book & site and it has helped us enormously already.
Best wishes moving forward
Nicky
x
Mariah,
The new site is beautiful. I’m excited for you and eager to see what’s ahead in this next chapter.
Sarah