Months in development with a few personal hiccups along the way, I’m proud to share with you the “new and improved” iteration of The Pappas Post. Although initial plans to launch were set at several months ago, a series of unexpected medical emergencies that had me on emergency flights from Greece back to New York City, as well as– count them– four different surgical procedures to mend some “internal plumbing.”
But all is well that ends well and today, I’m excited to share the newly designed website, powered by the dynamic team at customedialabs, a state-of-the-art digital marketing agency with a bi-national presence in Philadelphia and Larisa, Greece.
The partnership evolved after a conversation with the company’s chief visionary, Manos Sifakis, who has been a long time reader and follower of all things Pappas Post, but who had some strong opinions about how we were reaching you, our valued readers and how our information was getting to you.
Manos and his team took a deep dive into our analytics, our content and the back-end technical details of the website– by then an outdated framework that was, on its best day, missing the opportunity to share the compelling content that we were creating for our tens of thousands of monthly readers.
In a nutshell, we were writing interesting and informative content but it wasn’t reaching its potential because our methods of getting it to you were outdated and infective.
And although this plan to reinvent and reshape the Pappas Post started many months prior and we did intend to launch the “new and improved” version to you a lot sooner than now, life got in the way and I was hospitalized numerous times to deal with a recurring issue in my gastrointestinal region that began with my first cancer diagnosis more than six years ago.
Fortunately, thanks to the great medical care that I received both here in New York City, as well as in Greece, all of that is behind me now and I’m excited to take a deep dive back into what I love doing the most– which is creating and sharing content about Greece and the entire Greek world.
The biggest change you might notice, apart from the actual stylistic changes to the website, is the type of content I’ll be sharing. I’ve decided to focus more on content related to culture, history, lifestyle and heritage– as opposed to the daily news and politics that you can read by other trusted (and quite frankly, much better news organizations) than The Pappas Post.
You will notice these changes in our menu bar and the categories which we determined to be the most read by you, after studying our analytics.
We will be re-launching our email newsletter which will bring our content into your inbox regularly. If you aren’t on the list, add your email here. For the summer period we’ll launch this twice a month and as Fall comes, sometime in September, we will once again send the newsletter weekly.
In the meantime, we will find new and exciting ways to utilize our social media channels and encourage you to follow, if you don’t already. Through Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter), we hope to engage with you more.
Finally, my pledge has always been to provide our content free– with no paywall, as other sites utilize to manage the costs associated with maintaining a website. A few years back we launched a free-will support system that allowed our readers to support our efforts on a monthly, or annual basis. With no set amount, the idea was to ask you what you believed our content was worth to you and to offer that through our automated payment system.
If you’d like to support us now, or at any time in the future, you can visit this link and select the amount and the frequency that best suits your budget.
I’m appreciative of the opportunity to start our conversation again. I look forward to hearing from you about engaging in thoughtful, meaningful conversations and once again, make The Pappas Post an open platform for dialogue.
