11 years ago, I registered MomAtHome.com to go with my freelance design side biz, Mom at Home Design. I’ve been working for C3 fulltime for four years, and it’s been a while since I made the decision to shed most of the “Mom” stuff from the site.

This morning I decided to make the official change to using judisohn.com as my primary domain. None of the content is changing or moving, it’s just about changing what shows in the address bar. It makes sense on many levels. I’ve been energized about blogging again recently, so the timing is good.

I have to admit that I was influenced by Steve Rubel’s switch from Micro Persuasion to SteveRubel.com. If someone with his audience can give up a blog brand that no longer worked for him and put it under another roof as his approach to tech evolved, what the heck was I afraid of? The “brand” I’m working on is me. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s time for the domain to match.

It was easier to do than I thought it would be. Visits to judisohn.com were landing here anywhere, I just didn’t advertise it. For my email address, I added judisohn.com as a domain in Google Apps, along with all the necessary MX entries on my MediaTemple hosted domain. Now any email address to my @momathome.com email will automatically work for @judisohn.com. In Gmail, I set the new domain as my default sending address. Over time, I’ll change the email everywhere it needs to be changed.

For the site, in WordPress I set the new domain as the blog’s address. Simple. My feeds are all on FeedBurner, so that was an easy switch. Folks subscribed to my complete feed shouldn’t see any difference.

Google Webmaster tools has a nice “change of address” feature that let’s you tell it that you’ve moved your site. That’s done, although I know it will take some time until searches return results at the new domain.

My last hurdle is to make sure that visits to momathome.com/whatever show as judisohn.com/whatever in the address bar. Right now, you can enter on a momathome.com link and it stays that way until you move around the site and then it converts to judisohn.com links. I’m pretty sure it’s a change to my .htaccess file, but I’m not entirely sure what to type. Anyone know?

P.S. If you have this site bookmarked or linked as momathome.com or “Mom at Home” I’d appreciate it if you could change the link to judisohn.com and call it either “A View from Judi Sohn” or even just “Judi Sohn’s Blog.” Thanks!