Site Redesign: Design Phase
August 6, 2006, 11:55 AM | 0 Comments
In my limited design experience, I’ve come to realize that the hardest part of any re-design (or any new project for that matter) is deciding on the look and feel of the site. Truer words could not be said about the road I took to come up with the new design for this site. It took me three completely different design iterations to finally come up with something that I wanted to stick with and develop. The process was long and drawn out, lasting two and a half months and getting squeezed into whatever free time I could find while preparing to move into our new house.
It’s possible that the huge time span it took me to design the site was actually the reason why I became so dissatisfied with the first two iterations of the design. Over time (like most designers I know) I typically become more and more critical of my own work. Perhaps the biggest advantage of designing for yourself is also the biggest disadvantage: there are no hard deadlines. The fact that I hadn’t set a deadline gave me more time to second guess the design decisions I had made, not to mention more time to come up with new ideas or to nit-pick about every little area.
After trying a couple of visually intense design ideas, I came to the decision that I wanted to go with a clean simplistic design and something that would use white-space better. I also had decided to design for a minimum resolution of 1024x768 and finally leave 800x600 behind. Going by my stats, most of my users have resolutions of 1024x768 or larger, and the percentage of users still using an 800x600 resolution was under 4%. It’s for those reasons that I had started to refer to this design as the “Embrace the Space” version.
Whatever design I came up with though had to accomplish some tasks that I had set out before-hand. There were a lot of things about the old site that I wasn’t totally happy with, and there were a few new features that I wanted to develop for the new version. My short list went something like this:
- Related Entries: I wanted to make it easier for visitors to find related content on my site, something a little more intuitive than the typical ‘Blog entries by Category’ idea.
- Noteworthy Entries: Everyone has a few entries or pages that they know are their most popular ones. I wanted a way to highlight these entries on my site, to again make it easier for visitors to find the content they’re looking for. I got the idea from sites like Mike Davidson’s blog and Nathan Smith’s blog and thought it was about time I had something like this on my own site.
- Hot Topics: In conjunction with the Noteworthy section of the site, this further allows visitors to see the most popular content on my site. Hopefully it also encourages more discussion.
- Gravatars and better Comment design: Gravatars are just a cool idea in the first place, so I knew I wanted to have them here and my original comment design needed some work. I never really considered it a bad design before, but I wanted something a little more obvious and unique to me. I also wanted to give visitors some more options of xhtml tags they could use in their comments, so I added support for the code, blockquote and del tags in addition to the strong, em and a href tags that were already supported the first time around. Oh, and if you don’t have a Gravatar (or don’t know what they are), go to gravatar.com and get one because a lot of great people have embraced their use.
- Better Secondary content (sidebar) design: I wanted to give some of the content in the sidebar of my site a little more weight in the design. Also, the calendar was almost retired but I decided to add it back in because I still think it’s a useful way of finding archived content.
- Better ‘Text only’ entry design: This was one of my most important priorities for the new design. I wanted the content to look good without feeling a need to add graphics to my entries so that they’d look better. In my old design I almost felt obligated to add a picture in the entry so that it would look good. The design just didn’t seem to hold up on its own without adding some extra ‘eye candy.’ I wanted to be able to get away from that and let the content speak for itself more.
There are more new features of the site than what I mentioned in my list above (see my entry announcing the launch of the new site), but these were the main goals of the redesign and overall I think I was able to accomplish what I had set out to do and a little more. I was also really glad that I didn’t have to compromise one goal for another and that everything just sort of came together and worked. There are still some areas of the site that I’m tweaking as I go along and I’m still going through a lot of testing (especially in IE), but I wanted to launch the new site anyways - warts and all.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, praise or heckling about the site, please feel free to post a comment and let me know. Also, if you run across anything that seems a little odd to you or looks kind of funny, don’t hesitate to make me aware of it.