After thinking and working and dreaming and planning a complete blog redesign for over a year, I finally…hired a friend to get it done. Thanks to the extraordinary design acumen of my dear friend, Tiffany (of TJ Design), my dream has materialized into a blog that is everything I hoped it would be! I hope that you will be as excited as I am about the new look and layout.

In an effort to be a good hostess, I thought I would give you a brief tour of the new site. Across the top, you’ll notice a bar with a menu that will take you to the five main areas of the site: Home, About, Archives, Community, and Store. These are followed by icons with quick links to helpful resources: the RSS feed for the site, the Music Matters Blog YouTube channel, my Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn accounts, and a direct link to e-mail me.

All of the areas are pretty self-explanatory, but the one I am probably the most excited about is the Community area of the site. This was inspired by my friend and fellow piano teacher Julia (instructor at the PianoForte Studio in Grass Valley, California). She has been compiling and organizing a list of music-related internet resources for years and  graciously sent her list to me on several occasions. I wanted to be able to share these with others, but didn’t have a good system in place to do so. Thus was borne the idea for the Community area of Music Matters Blog!

When you enter the Community area, you will see a list of categories that are chock-full of up-to-date links to pretty much anything you could ever want to find related to music education on the internet. I know I’ll be using these all the time, and hope that they will prove to be a helpful resource for you as well! Julia will be running this part of the site, so please feel free to contact her if you have sites you’d like her to add and/or run across any broken links.

The Store area has also been given a facelift and includes a page of Testimonials that I’ve been collecting through the years from those who have purchased and used the practice incentive themes and other products. If you would like to add your testimonial – or especially if you have blog posts and/or pictures posted that I can link to of you and your students using any of the materials – please send me an e-mail let me know. I’d love to include you on this page!

To the right you’ll notice that we’ve added a Recent Comments widget so that you can quickly see and click over to the posts have the most recent activity. At the bottom of the site you’ll find links to Advertising Opportunities, Our Disclosure Policy, Terms of Use, and the Site Map. I’m still adding and tweaking various things on the site, so please let me know what you think and if you have any additional suggestions. Thanks to each of you who are part of the music education community and who have encouraged and supported me through these 6+ years of blogging at Music Matters Blog. I look forward to many more years of working together with the goal of inspiring creativity in music education!