A successful cityblog migration to Ning

In my free time, I run a site called Duke City Fix. It's a modest city blog focused on Albuquerque, New Mexico which is a place needing exactly such a blog to stir the pot, stoke the fire, and generally give the mainstream media in town a run for their money.

Last weekend after experimenting for 3 months with Wordpress and other CMS options, I decided to migrate our respectable posse of readers to Ning.

The results have been mesmerizing.

After nearly 3 years of blogging for a faceless audience, the Ning experience felt like meeting your birth parents for the very first time. Familiar names joined the community and added photos and bios every couple of minutes. In a day, we had 200 members and triple the traffic from casual readers.

Page views have doubled too while bounces, something I feared might increase due to the jarring move, have remained low. I'm watching the site's vital signs like an ER doc and my only worry right now is the speed of Ning's servers. The site loads slowly sometimes despite the fact that I'm paying an extra bandwidth premium each month. If it gets much worse, I'll need to get some attention from the Ning folks.

I'd like to say that the migration of one of the Top 10 Placeblogs in America was a raging success, but I'm cautious. It's only been a week and many readers are just returning from vacation to find that Duke City Fix, well... looks a little different.