Comments on: Do I need a blog redesign?

By: 8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009

8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009 — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:24:47 +0000

[...] Developer Mitch Canter to complete. We involved the community in the iterations of the design, and frequently asked for feedback. I even used controversial crowdSPRING to crowdsource my banner design, (thanks [...]

By: 8 Principles for the Modern Blog …at least for 2009 « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:01:11 +0000

[...] involved the community in the iterations of the design, and frequently asked for feedback. I even used controversial crowdSPRING to crowdsource my banner design, based on [...]

By: Bob Potter

Bob Potter — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:29:40 +0000

I agree with others – a bigger font size would do my eyes well.

I like the length of your posts, they are perfect, but it would be nice if your homepage posts included the title plus the first paragraph or so. Since you write so much it would be nice to scroll through the articles a bit faster looking for the ones I want. Just bit more user friendly for my reading preferences.

By: Carlos Hernandez

Carlos Hernandez — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:32:45 +0000

You have loyal readership and I don’t believe warrants a re-design.

Do consider addding a “Share” widget.

By: martinjy

martinjy — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:33:44 +0000

The design seems fine to me: simple + professional. But 95% of the time I consume your content via Google Reader, so what do I know.

Your list of “categories” could do with a workover, though. It’s more of a list of tags, in my opinion, and not particularly useful (at least to me).

If I were in your shoes I’d invest some time in sorting my posts into 5-7 solid categories, then maybe offering an RSS feed for each?

Apart from that, I appreciate all the time you put into this site. Thanks!

By: ronald van den hoff

ronald van den hoff — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:58:39 +0000

we just did a redesign on our social network blog: http://www.mindz.com/blog .
It was the result of many talks to European bloggers, our audiance. So, depending of where your readers are comming from: you could consider 2 or 3 designs at the same time, so people can default there own preference…

By: Shannon Swenson

Shannon Swenson — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:06:18 +0000

I recently redesigned my set with a premium template from Woo Themes. It’s the first time I’ve paid for a template after a dozen or more WP sites and I’m glad I did. I got a clean customizable design, lucid code and a helpful support community.

If you’re considering a switch in platforms, I’ve found Expression Engine to be very flexible while producing SeeChangeNow.org.

Your search results & category pages could be improved with showing excerpts. Right now we have to either use Google or sift through entire posts.

I suspect aesthetics are a low priority. We come here for your analysis and I’d wager a large audience consumes your blog through readers. However, you can justify a change with some of the usability and promotional mods mentioned Curt Monash. HTH!

By: Chris Christensen

Chris Christensen — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:19:41 +0000

For me once a template reaches a certain level of attractiveness (yours does) then any other changes to the template would be to enable some additional content.

By: Melissa Bradshaw

Melissa Bradshaw — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:33:17 +0000

Hi Jeremiah,

I’m Curt Monash’s blog designer (for his self-hosted blogs, not his Network World one), and I followed his link here. I agree with much of what has been said so far. As I see it, there are two major issues with the current design:

1) It looks “out of the box.” The quality and quantity of content you’re producing merit something special and unique, something that looks like it was designed just for this purpose.

2) The current sidebar isn’t very helpful. Even at a fairly high resolution (1280×1024), I have to do quite a bit of scrolling before I even start seeing a category list.

I would suggest seriously considering a three-column layout. That way one could be devoted to navigation, and the other to profile/promotional stuff. You might also consider moving some of the current sidebar links (such as Contact) up into the header section.

If you prefer to stick to a two-column design, I think navigation needs to be MUCH more prominent. Much of the stuff that’s currently “above the fold” in the sidebar doesn’t deserve prime real estate. (Flickr Photos is the main example that jumps out at me.)

As a new visitor, I’d also love to see a list of “Featured Posts” or “Hot Topics” or something like that to get me started.

Another idea: Since some of the category names are rather vague, you might consider adding descriptions to them. That way when people hover over them, they’ll see a more detailed description. (I turned that feature off in Curt’s blogs, because he uses HTML formatting in his descriptions and the source code would show up in the hover, but it might work well for you.)

Good luck!
Melissa

By: brian

brian — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:45:43 +0000

more rounded corners! But seriously, maybe think about the first time reader. You have so many posts and so many categories that the archives are kind of useless. Yeah, sure folks can search, and I know nobody admits to browsing any more since it is so 1.0, but I think a few more taxonomy layers would help organize the wealth of content you have created. Granted, this is a shortcoming of most blog software, though some bloggers create pages to organize content by topic, which allows organization methodologies that aren’t restricted to most recent first.