After a few hours of testing, tweaking, tracking down bugs and fixing up a few small glitches I’m happy to say that the ProBlogger Design Relaunch is looking stable and we’re tucking it into bed for the night.
Ben has also just headed to bed (after pulling a late night) for some well deserved rest.
There are still a few things that we’ll work on over the next 24 hours or so including:
- Search – the search field in the top right hand corner isn’t producing results yet
- Archives – link in top menu will produce more than just dated archives
- Print Stylesheets – while the new template does print better Ben will produce an even better option for this
- Job Board Integration – the Job Board will receive a similar makeover and the latest jobs from it will appear on the front page of ProBlogger
- ie6 bugs – we’re aware of the sidebar issue with ie6 and will produce an ie6 stylesheet to rectify this
There are also a few minor styling tweaks to be made and I need to tidy up the categories and other links in the footer a little – but apart from these issues there’s not a lot more to do to get things up to speed for the time being.
At this point it’s over to you. There will no doubt be a few more bugs that we’ve not found yet and different issues for those of you on different browsers. If you find anything that’s not covered above please do let us know.
I’d invite your comment and constructive feedback in comments below. This is a work in progress and while we’re happy with where this design takes us both Ben and I would like your help in taking it to the next level.
Once again I’d like to thank Ben Bleikamp for his amazing design work, Mike Rohde for his logo, Gary King for his reworking of the Job Board (he’s completely reworked the back end of it – we’ll go live with the new version tomorrow) and the b5media tech team for their support through this process.
PS: both Ben and I intend to write more on the process of this redesign in the coming days so those of you with questions feel free to continue to ask them and we’ll attempt to get some answers together for you.
ok, very nicely done redesign! not smacking the older design…but me likey likey!
ok, time to click around here a bit and check out the new digs! great work :)
Darren, Great Design absolutley love the new design, tbh not so keen on the logo but hey I can live with that. Really clean look and the sidebar has improved ten fold.
The print stylesheet will save me a lot of time! Maybe you can get rid of the Navigation, Sidebar and the footer Links, too. And I would put the new problogger logo at the top of every printed site.
I don’t like this layout. It was more “problogger” than this. This one seems to be a reworked one starting from one of that free templates you can find on the WP site… ;)
New design is definitely better than the older one.
Congratulation Darren for the new site.
love your former design. this new design also beautiful. great job!
All I have to say is Neat!!
Good job Darren.
I like the new design, nice and clean. I always found the navigation on your old site to be non-intuitive. Great choice.
I use IE 6 at work, no other option is available, and your site does not comes right. The right column skips it position and goes all the way down on the page. Check this out it may be easy to fix.
Other than that, great page design, I really like it.
Cheers,
Luis
hi darren…its a lovely design. We all know you are rolling in riches but I would really like to know the impact of chucking out Adsense ads completely.
Darren,
Its seems there’s a bug – The site can’t load properly in IE 6; the right sidebar shifts to the bottom. Whereas in Firefox it just works fine.
The single post is good, but the homepage doesn’t looks any like a blog anymore.
thanks again – we’re aware of the ie6 issues (see the post above) and hope to have it resolved in the next day.
Vincent – if you prefer a more traditional blog layout then there is that option (click the ‘blog’ link in the top menu).
We will be continuing to massage the homepage though to highlight the recent content a touch more but it is a purposeful shift away from presenting it as a straight blog. I’ll write more on the thinking behind this in the coming days.
Frankly speaking, this design is just too “normal” if compare with your previous design.
The logo in normal too. And I don’t see any color to represent this blog(previous I think it’s orange).
There is no more your photo on the top of the page. That’s the trademark I think for problogger but you just put it below of this blog.
Side bar is full of advertisements. It’s so obvious that you are using sidebar to advertise and making money.
Categories had been moved down too. Seems like it’s hard to look for your previous posts.
Sorry if I am wrong. I just prefer your previous design. It makes you so different from other blogs and that’s why make you look more pro too.
Andrew Boyd:
You can track subscriber numbers from the chicklet counter – and I’ll try to remember to post other stats in the coming weeks once things have settled.
Kay – thanks for your honesty. We’ll keep working on things here and your comments will help.
In terms of the ads in the sidebar – the blog does have to earn its way and my thinking is that rather than the 12 or so ad units that used to be scattered across ProBlogger that now there are just 6 in the one defined spot.
In terms of colors – I hear what you’re saying. The problem with the orange was that quite a few readers found it a difficult color to read on their screens due to older style screens and also some who had eyesite problems.
I do hear what you’re saying though in terms of branding and ‘normal’ – but I think we’ve got a few little plans in mind that will help with this. Didn’t want to roll everything out at once though :-)
Categories are down the bottom – but on the previous design they were at the bottom of a very very long sidebar. Now they will also be featured in the ‘archives’ tab at the top of the blog (we’ll add that tomorrow) and now they are now more prominently featured on the top of each post.
Not saying you’re wrong with your comments – they’re actually helpful – but my hope is that with a few more tweaks and a bit more exploring that you’ll find some of your concerns alleviated.
I like the new design, very clean and crisp! Keep up the great work.
Darren – Love the new look. Much cleaner and easier to read. I agree with Kay that your picture on the main page was a nice touch. When I found your site that picture helped me connect with you (not sure why…maybe I flet like I had just stepped into Darren’s office).
Looking forward to exploring more and finding out all the new features.
Matt
Great Redesign darren :)
love the site front page…it is somewhat a trendy nowaday with
a news like front page….
but as couple of comments stated, the font are not read friendly in my end…and also the orange is gone..i always think that the orange is a symbolise of problogger:)
anyhow i prefer this theme than the old one tho..Great!
@Kay I agree with you, the old design had character and I’m finding it hard to like this new one. There are some elements to the new design I like so I’ve done a mashup of the old and new designs on my blog. I think this design would get some of the old style charm back if there was some colour and some enticing links across the top of the page rather than down below.
I am looking forward to seeing more changes rolled out.
Thanks for looooooooong reply.. I do hope for better design in coming days. :D
By the way, your sidebar drops to bottom in IE 6. Take note take note.
And one more thing, I can’t get use to read your blog without seeing your photo…feel weird.
I like the portal layout for your home page. It is a nice departure from the traditional while still being usable. Great job.
Wow! Nice new design ;) I love it!
First, congrats on the new design! I think it looks a LOT better.
Having dumped an old style myself for a new template (I use WordPress), I know what it’s like to jump to a new design. Will people like it? Won’t they?
The thing I didn’t realize was the amount of tweaking and custom work I’d done in the old design that didn’t make it into the first cut of my new site. I’m happy to say it’s fixed now, but I did have a few “where did that go….oh, yeah!” moments.
Now I have everything in widgets, and it’s a lot easier to keep track of.
Hi Darren,
Nice work ! :)
i just took a peek into your page source.
Its having a double end tag
ProBlogger Redesign – Bedding Down for the Night
i think that was a mistake. pardon me if i was wrong nu inteded it to be there :)
i liked the colours ! :D
oh sorry that got formatted.. what i meant was… the title tag has got two end tags. which isnt necessary ? is it?
:)
The only thing I don’t like is in the “best of problogger” 3 of the best articles are posts about your redesign. Maybe you could hand pick 10 articles that you think is your best work instead of relying on a plug-in or most commented on or whatever your using to determine the best.
Nice redesign, Darren. Yet you have to work on the IE6 issues asap. I know you mentioned that as a priority but they really wasting the good job made on the design.
Color combination is perfect and it’s definitely better than the noisy orange.
Good Luck.
oops. I do see you have a tab for Darren’s Fave’s but really, it doesn’t seem right that 3 of the 10 best posts of all time are about your site redesign.
I don’t usually see your site because I read it in my RSS reader, but I do like it and the way its organized now makes it more likely that I’ll go directly to your site and look around.
I REALLY like it. Much easier to read, but less crowded… a great improvement.
Darren, really like the new look, congrats…
very modern, very neat, but I HATE this font! you can’t see a difference between “o” and “e” and reading is very uncomfy!
I’m assuming you’ve taken the decision to highlight the “pro” rather than the “blogger” with not just the redesign but the move away from the classic blog layout. I’m undecided on the design, but I never make a decision within the first few minutes of seeing a new design. The only thing that strikes me immediately is that its a much more generic design. If I had multiple windows open I could very easily see which one was problogger (I tend to read longer articles in sections, especially if there are lots of links to follow), I can’t say that now because it looks a lot like other blogs. You may also lose some of the feeling that you’re just a blogger (albeit one who’s doing very well) with a more corporate look, not sure if that will put people off or not.
One other quick thing, the submission form for the 31 days readers writing project doesn’t seem to be showing up in FireFox on OSX.
Hope you get through the always stressful redesign period.
there seems to be an issues with the sidebar with IE but with FireFox it is great!
Hi Darren,
The general layout has a nice, sleek look, but for some reason the text is A LOT less readable for me. I upped the Text Size and it was still pretty hard on the eyes. I’m going to have trouble reading your longer articles in the new format and will probably have to stick to the feed if this doesn’t change. And no, I don’t have vision problems.
Hi Darren & Ben,
I’d be curious to know how you setup wordpress so that you have what would be a normal WordPress home page at problogger.net/blog and yet your permalinks structure is still the old one without the word “blog” in it?
Did you install WordPress into a folder called “blog”? Or are there some redirects in play?
Thanks.
Hi Darren,
I really like the new look. It´s more refreshing and more modern than the old one. And I like your frontpage as well, I think that your visitors probably will stay longer at your blog. It´s seems to be easier to navigate.
You might want to change your favicon to the new logo though.
i made the screenshots for you, may be there are more people with this issue:
what i see:
http://i9.tinypic.com/4pxhbh1.gif
what should it probably look like (screen from friend):
http://home.arcor.de/b00nz0r/problogger.JPG
To me the most interesting thing is it is now less of a blog and more of a Web site (ie, a publication-type site)—without the full or at least long post contents and by making the blog hole on the front page so narrow, it REALLY deviates from what the user expects of a blog site.
I’d be interested in the thinking that went into that decision in particular.
I think standard UIs — and a blog is many things, but it is also a very standard user interface with specific user expectations about how it looks and acts — are hugely important in software/Web apps.
It is very brave — but I’d also say risky — to deviate from it.
Hi Darren,
Your silent observer here :P. I like this new layout. The other layout was nice as well, but this is a lot brighter and there’s more space for all the information that you provide on this site. The first word that popped into my head as I looked at this new layout was “portal”. If that’s the look that you were going for, then I think you achieved it. I haven’t attempted to view this site in any browsers other than firefox, but in firefox it looks good.
As for the logo.. I wonder if your intention was to emphasize that you are more of a blogger rather then a “pro”… I like the color choice, good contrast.. Anyways, that’s all I’ll say for now… Be safe.
~N
Wow, I didn’t even catch it at first, but you actually have a separate “blog” section:
https://problogger.com/blog
Which makes me even more interested in the decisions about how to piece together the new home page/site entry point.
I, myself, find it a bit disorienting….you made me spend ten minutes figuring out how the site works. Now I was *interested* in learning that, but most readers aren’t. They want to know how a site works at first glance and get to using it.
Can’t wait to read your discussion of the decision-making and follow your experiences with the new design.
Darren – I’m in LOVE!
This is fabulous… simply fabulous!
Cluttered. It looks like everything is coming at me all at once. I would have sat in the redesign phase a little longer. It looks rushed or like you slapped a template up and are scrambling to organize everything. Maybe in time it’ll get better. Right now, you should put back up the old site. :)
Much more corporate looking. I like it!
This is an awesome redesign! It won’t be long before every WordPress Theme comes with a
home.phppage modeled after this one. It’s something I’d been thinking of myself. I’m glad someone that knows what they’re doing has been too.One thing I noticed (someone else may have too — I can’t read 80 comments) when I hover over the “Blog” link in the menu while on an archived page. the cursor is an arrow instead of the friendly “link-hand”. If this was intentional, that’s fair, but at least you know one reader found it weird.
I love the change. The new color scheme is easier for me to look at, and the page itself seem to be cleaner. The ProBLOGGER logo is very chic. Congrats!
this looks great, omg like way way better then the old design :) props! To be honest if your content wasn’t as good as it was I would have not checked out your old site for longer then 15 secs.
This feels fresh, clean, “organized” and my eyes aren’t hurting…
The site looks great. I can access some topics allot easier with the Categories links.
I was just getting used to the other template colors :-)
I like it! Very cool. The new look is modern and sleek, the colors are great. Maybe now I can find all of those archived articles I need to study up on. Best of Luck, Emma