The Vision Behind The Rebranding of Changing Lanes

The Brainstorm

Back in October, John and I started talking one day; what started out as a normal conversation quickly transformed into a wild brainstorming session about the future of Changing Lanes as a blog and what we wanted to do with it. We loved using it as a forum to keep in touch with friends and family back home, but since we were getting more settled into our every day lives here in California, we wanted to offer our readers more than just an update on our day to day.

When we asked ourselves where we saw the blog in five years, the possibilities were endless. We knew what had to be done to get our blog to the place that we wanted it – but were we up for the challenge?

Starting Out

We were both excited at the prospect of the new blog, but weren’t sure if we were capable of the skills required to build our own site. What better way to find out than try, right? (Since our road trip, the bigger the challenge, the more empowered John and I are to achieve it.) First task was to create the name of our blog so we could buy the domain name.

While at work one day, I was thinking about the content strategy plan for the new blog and just thinking about how I was excited about the blog in general and at the same time was listening to the song that was playing over dt’s office sound system. I started humming along to “This is the Rhythm of the Night” the classic tune by Corona. And as I sang along, one line hit me in Corona’s sultry voice “This is the rhythm of my life”. “That’s it!,” I immediately thought to myself, “The perfect name for the blog is Rhythm Of Our Lives!”

The Long Journey

On November 6, after creating a tentative game plan for building our website and deciding that Rhythm of our Lives was the perfect new name for the rebranded Changing Lanes, we purchased our domain and hosting on GoDaddy.com. We were excited to have made our first purchases, but had no idea really where to go from there. John started experimenting with WordPress, and quickly started learning his way around the site. Each thing we needed to do was a challenge, since we had no prior experience of any sort!

One of the first major challenges we faced was figuring out how to import all our content from not only Changing Lanes, but from another personal blog, as well, Sounds A Lot Like Life. We wanted Rhythm Of Our Lives to house the new content we were going to create, but also be the home for my musings pieces from Sounds A Lot Like Life and the beautiful story of our travels and how we got to California from Changing Lanes. We were able to import the posts using a plug-in, but were sorely disappointed when we realized that the posts didn’t import correctly and we had to manually go through and upload each post’s content and images separately. Needless to say, this was a project that took weeks, but was so worth it in the end. By mid-January, all our imported content was looking sexy on our new site!

Over the course of several months, John and I learned the trials and tribulations of WordPress, purchased a bunch of themes that ended up not working out, became in-tune with the fact that we were both artistically challenged, and hit hundreds of road blocks along the way. We realized after switching hosting twice that GoDaddy wasn’t capable of hosting our site, so we had to switch it a third time. With each new challenge there was a lesson learned!

I realized how thankful I was to work with an office full of designers and developers, when on multiple occasions John or I would struggle with figuring something out for an entire weekend, and I’d go in to work on Monday morning and ask any one of them and have an answer on most occasions in 5 minutes or less. They are all so amazing, and after having worked so hard on Rhythm of Our Lives, I have a newfound respect for what they do on a daily basis!

We hired one of the girls that I work with, Amanda Singleton, to do a lot of the artwork for our new page, and she also designed a bomb “About Me” page. We started pumping up our social media presence and have been getting ready for launch. Our long and hard journey of completely rebranding and redesigning Changing Lanes is coming to a close! We’re so excited to unveil what we’ve been working so hard on!

What to Expect

Many of you will be continuing to follow our journey from Changing Lanes- you can find all that content and more on Rhythm of Our Lives. As a part of our content restructuring, we wanted to bring you something less biographical, and instead, offer you timeless, valuable information. We’ll be focusing on bringing you exciting content to keep you inspired and motivated to lead the healthy and fulfilling life you want to live! We’ll still be keeping you updated on what we’re up to in San Diego, but we’ll be presenting the content to you in a different light – don’t worry, you’ll see :). 

We hope you enjoy what we’ve done. Let us know what you think of our rebrand and design of our new site in the comments below!

Review on Chris Kresser's 9 Steps to Perfect Health - #1 Don't Eat Toxins

Hi Readers!  Sorry updates have been a bit sporadic since the new year.  John and I have been doing great lately, and although we've been extremely busy, we're doing well! Aside from work being hectic, we've also both been studying away for our Real Estate Exams that are coming up soon, exploring potential business opportunities/investments, and working diligently on getting the new blog ready for launch.

However busy we may be, though, we've been making it a point to relax and enjoy San Diego while taking advantage of the nice weather that we moved here for! Yesterday it was nearly 80 degrees here, so John and I packed a picnic lunch and hung out on the beach for the afternoon. It was wonderful to kick back and relax for a bit while working on our tans for the first time of the season!

On the topic of relaxation, I'm currently undergoing some major personal lifestyle changes, from working out every morning, to establishing and maintaining a healthy diet, to focusing on giving myself newfound "Melissa time".  My stomach has been bothering me lately, and although we aren't yet sure if it's related to stress, or an allergy, or something entirely different, I've been trying to make positive changes to better myself, and I am determined to improve my mental and gut health by the end of 2014!

An article that I recently read, entitled 9 Steps To Perfect Health - #1: Don't Eat Toxins, by Chris Kresser was a real eye opener for me.  Since I haven't been feeling the greatest, I've been thinking a lot about what I'm eating and putting into my body, and the more I learn, the more appalled I become at some of the practices that have become norm in this country in regards to the foods that we so readily consume on a daily basis.

Although the article is a bit overwhelming in length, it is SO worth the read.  I'd highly recommend taking the 15 or so minutes to get through it.  I can't even believe that all of these foods (that are really toxins) are still available to us to eat, let alone that they're in nearly everything we consume!!! And they aren't "toxins" you'd think they'd be, they're four food products that we eat regularly, that are found in nearly everything that we as Americans consume - refined cereal grains, industrial seed oils, sugar, and processed soy.  "Bread, pastries, muffins, crackers, cookies, soda, fruit juice, fast food and other convenience foods are all loaded with these toxins. And when the majority of what most people eat on a daily basis is toxic, it’s not hard to understand why our health is failing." 

I was appalled at the info on soy: (And soy is in so much that we eat without us even knowing it!!)

"Perhaps most alarmingly, a study at the Harvard Public School of Health in 2008 found that men who consumed the equivalent of one cup of soy milk per day had a 50% lower sperm count than men who didn’t eat soy.  

In 1992, the Swiss Health Service estimated that women consuming the equivalent of two cups of soy milk per day provides the estrogenic equivalent of one birth control pill. That means women eating cereal with soy milk and drinking a soy latte each day are effectively getting the same estrogen effect as if they were taking a birth control pill.  

This effect is even more dramatic in infants fed soy formula. Babies fed soy-based formula have 13,000 to 22,000 times more estrogen compounds in their blood than babies fed milk-based formula. Infants exclusively fed soy formula receive the estrogenic equivalent (based on body weight) of at least five birth control pills per day."

WHATTTT?!  And then there's this, which is interesting to me as I am definitely finding myself having become very gluten sensitive, and possibly even gluten intolerant.

"Dr. Kenneth Fine, a pioneer in gluten intolerance research, has demonstrated that 1 in 3 Americans are gluten intolerant, and that 8 in 10 have the genes that predispose them to developing gluten intolerance.  

This is nothing short of a public health catastrophe in a nation where the #1 source of calories is refined flour. But while most are at least aware of the dangers of sugar, trans-fat and other unhealthy foods, fewer than 1 in 8 people with celiac disease are aware of their condition."

I know we should take all things that we read with a grain of salt, but I just thought I'd share what I thought was an exceptionally interesting article.  Hope all is well with every one of you!  John and I are getting extremely excited to show you RhythmofourLives.com.  It's so close to being done and ready for launch!!