BE A VOICE AND GATHERING PLACE FOR CENTRISTS & MODERATES

Centrists Rising is essentially Rise of the Center (our old site, which shut down a few months back, after about two years) 3.0, with some added functionality, a better layout, more solid backend and search engine focused for people looking for content related to centrist to moderate politics and independent news.

Centrists Rising is the brand that’s going to take us from the bush leagues (where we are, and have been), to at least the minor leagues over the next couple/few years. With a bunch of work, and a bit of luck, we’ll get our shot at the majors. We’re not aiming at being some centrist / moderate HuffPo, but I have every confidence that we can grow to be the biggest site for centrists and moderates – the ‘Big Tent Center’, within a few years.

The short term to medium term goal is to catch up with minor league blogs like The Moderate Voice, and Outside the Beltway. This is no small task, as both have been around for several years – almost ten years for OTB – and (especially with Outside the Beltway) are decent sources of moderate (generally center-left at The Moderate Voice, and center-right at Outside the Beltway) political opinion blogging.

The long term goal, however long it may take, is to be the big tent centrist / moderate version of sites like Daily Kos (on the left) or Pajamas Media (on the right) – among many other successful political blogs. No centrist / moderate blogs have made it to that level… and it’s about time one did. If you help (by blogging, sharing links with your social networks, liking/following/subscribing to our feeds, or just reading regularly), we can get there.

 

WHY A NEW NAME?!?!?

For those who were attached to Rise of the Center – it wasn’t an easy choice for me to give up on something I’ve put so much work into, but the move just plain was necessary. We needed the word ‘centrist’ in the domain name itself, so we could better tap into the >200,000 or so people that punch that term into Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines each year, looking for centrist political information.

Like it or not, very few people use the search term ‘center’ when doing that, so I went with the same feeling for the name, shortened it a bit and here you have it.

 

WHAT’S NEW HERE?

I also did a top to bottom redesign, going through several designs until I found something crisp that seemed to fit (the design will continue to evolve over time, as I can afford it, and listening to reader feedback) and recently had to switch to a more expensive host that handles more of the backend stuff – most importantly security as we were hacked about a week before I was about to launch the site into a public beta and had to rebuild the site one more time… hopefully the last time.

This new site is more refined, faster loading, more search engine optimized, has forums, adds a community blog section and will include a section where we will begin collecting a political encyclopedia of sorts. It’s on a whole new level than Rise of the Center was.

Ultimately, if we want to be a voice for centrists and moderates, we need to do more than just be a platform for a few dozen bloggers. We needed to open up the doors so more people can contribute easier – so that’s exactly what we’re doing. We also needed to be easier to find – so we’re going to be working hard on that as well, with better search engine optimization and experimenting with advertising (if you can help, I’ll be setting up a PayPal donation button, with more than 100% of the proceeds – since I pay for some promotion every month out of pocket already – going to promoting the site, mostly on search engine and social ads like on Facebook).

There are more moving pieces to what we’re going to be doing here, but that is the core mission… to bring together some of the best voices for centrists and moderates, help make those voices heard by as many people that are open to listening to them as we can, and build a community around the ideas shared by centrists and moderates.

Thanks for stopping by and being a part of that!

 

Solomon KleinsmithSite Manager & Blogger