New Site Design Explained

Tuesday June 16, 2009

This last weekend some of you may have noticed the change in my blog (See the pic below for a comparison). Lets break down why I chose to do what I did and a few lessons you can take away to use on your own blogs.

sitevs

1. Personalize It

As you can see my old blog was bland and boring. It was a slightly modified version of the Magazeen theme. Partly due to me not being sure how committed I was going to be on this blog. Now with a good momentum I felt like it was worth putting some more effort into the entire blog. Personalizing a blog layout is something any serious blogger needs to take on. Like me, I think its good to initially feel out the website and the traffic behind it. My personalization was simple to a certain effect because simple is how I like to do my sites these days. I brought in a pic of myself and my personal logo. I retuned the rest of the site to reflect my simplicity. I ditched all the separation points and attempted to let the text do the talking and not so much the graphics.

sitevs_sidebar

2. Make elements easy to find

I wanted to make the site easier to navigate and understand. Sure the old theme had tons of fancy drop down menus and pictures all over the place from each of the posts. The idea of this blog is simplicity now. So I ditched all the unnecessary pictures and brought it back to the basics, text. This is the easiest way to make use of the header HTML tags and build a little more SEO power. I also reorganized the sidebar by bringing the category listing and about me section up. There was plenty of unused real estate up top to take advantage of.

sitevs_postfooter

3. Encourage users

On the single post view, I took advantage of the empty space next to the retweet button and added in a little thank you note from me. Along with the note there are some extra links to help spread the word about the post you’ve just read. I went for the most noninvasive approach and still visible, because who doesnt want a little more traffic!

Positive Effects

Ideally these latest changes to the site will give users a more personal connection with the branding alone. Then I gave them a better opportunity to read what I have to say. The idea with any site is to get users to come back and look at your content, giving yourself the highest possible exposure. Of course none of these ideas are full proof and will constantly have to be watched and retweaked, but for now it will be a good second version.

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  • Ryan:

    Contact me about a contract for you to design my sub cookbook blog and, eventually, web site.

    Aunt Nancy
  • riikka
    Hi Ryan, thanks for sharing your insights and tips customizing Magazeen theme. The new design is much fresher and neater than the original one. The improvement can be seen clearly when compared as before and after.

    Alas, I am in the beginning of the customization task, and would appreciate your advice on the main article image. The original theme crops the article image to square, while I'd rather keep it in full width (just like the latest article in home page). I have been looking for a code snippet to copy-paste, but to no avail. (I'm not a coder but a tinkerer.)

    How do you generate your full width article images?
  • Interesting article. I'm now struggling with the Magazeen sidebar items. I've noticed several times that if I don't use Magazeen or WP specific widgets, then the sidebar backgrounds won't expand to surround whatever content is placed in them. On my site now at http://chriskinsman.com/ I am experimenting with ad placement and the bottom widget won't expand. I'll be experimenting with the Magazeen Sponsored Ad widget, but it is too basic for my needs.
  • Yeah the Magazeen sidebar has limits. One of the reasons I switched out of it entirely controlling my site.

    My sidebar is handcoded. I find it to be much more versatile for me personally.
  • I'm thinking about recoding the stylesheet or php file to see if I can fix it. I really love the sidebar look. Overall, I really love the Magazeen theme, but there is just a lot of workarounds to figure out. I think WeFunction kinda left it upon the community to figure out all the issues. For instance, a lot of people requested the readme file that was supposed to be with the theme. Not one person responded from WeFunction.
  • I agree, it was obviously rushed and left solely to the community to deal with.
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