Can't change logo link

I need to change the logo link - which normally and by default points to <front> to point to a different URL altogether. Following advice on drupal.org and elsewhere, I modified the template.php in drupalexp as follows, changing <front> to the new URL in the linked_logo statement:

/**
 * Implement hook_process_region
 */
function drupalexp_process_region(&$vars) {
  $theme = drupalexp_get_theme();
  switch ($vars['elements']['#region']) {

<snip>

    case 'logo':
      $vars['logo'] = $theme->page['logo'];
      $vars['logo_img'] = !is_null($vars['logo']) ? '<img src="' . $vars['logo'] . '" id="logo"/>' : '';
      $vars['linked_logo'] = !is_null($vars['logo']) ? l($vars['logo_img'], 'http://www.mysite.com', array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('rel' => 'home'))) : '';
      break;
    case 'title':
      $vars['title_prefix'] = $theme->page['title_prefix'];
      $vars['title'] = $theme->page['title'];
      $vars['title_suffix'] = $theme->page['title_suffix'];
      break;
  }
}

This had no effect, the site still points to the site front page. I made a similar change on another theme and it did work, and I'm not sure what is going wrong here. Also attempted to change the region--logo.tpl.php to just have a straightforward <a> link to the desired location, that had no effect.

Also attempted to disable the logo display in the core theme settings, and create a new block with the logo image and link, but couldn't get the block to appear in the logo region.

Any help would be appreciated.