Redesigning your blog

We’ve been fortunate to work with a number of bloggers over the years who have chosen us to do their subsequent blog redesigns.

For example, we worked with Sarah McColl to update Pink of Perfection from this:

… to this:

A lot of redesigns are about tweaking what’s there already: improving branding/personal touches, reorganizing, refocussing and reflecting where the blog has gone since it was first designed.

When you first start a blog, you have all these ideas about how everything should work and what your focus will be. Six months down the track, you have refined your ideas, know what’s working and what’s not from practice, and have hopefully learnt a lot about what your readers are appreciating too.

Some bloggers start out simple with their blog layouts being in the traditional form of most recent first and scrolling down to read earlier posts, but discover that they’re adding too much content for this to be an efficient way for new readers to discover the breadth of their content. They often switch over to a magazine layout.

For example, The Naptime Chef went from a traditional layout:

… to a magazine one:

We’re currently working with Kathryn O’Malley of Dramatic Pancake to switch her to a more magazine layout rather than a traditional blog one.

Does that mean that you should start with a magazine layout?  Perhaps – but if you don’t end up posting too often, magazine layouts can be hard work keeping them looking fresh.  Magazine layouts work so much better for original image-rich content – not stock image photography.  Magazine layouts can also be overwhelming so the trick is in keeping them easy for new readers to skim over.

And, as it’s the start of a new year, we’re working on a bunch of other refreshes for our clients including Vampy Varnish.