1. Complete site redesign
2. We’ve just put our house on the market (yep the one that blogging built) and are building another one (how many freaking types of sinks/light fittings/door handles can a guy look at!?!!
OK – enough about the house (although I’m sure that at some point there will be a post about why building a blog is like building a house or one on why selling one is like selling yourself as a blogger)….
The new design has been live for 48 hours and 97% of the bugs are fixed. We’re still working on a couple more issues and you should see a few fixes for a couple of them in the next 24 hours (for example the ie6 sidebar issues are almost fixed, we have a favicon coming very soon and the newly designed job boards will follow).
The reaction from readers via comments in previous posts, posts around the web and emails has been mixed – although largely positive and encouraging. The critiques have all been read (thank you to everyone who has commented) and once things settle in the coming weeks and after we check how the site is performing Ben and I will sit down on Skype and work out how to shape things next.
In the mean time – Ben Bleikamp the designer of the new look has written a post on some of the reasoning behind the new design at his blog called Redesign of Problogger.net. In it he shares 3 parts of the brief that I gave him and how that unfolded from his perspective.
PS: I’m getting a lot of questions about how the new design has impacted things in terms of traffic and page views. It is to early to really report on this as I’ve found previously that a new design causes an increase in both visitors and page views as people surf in from RSS feeds to check things out and as they then go exploring how different pages look and operate.
As a result both unique visitors and page views are up so far – but I’ll update more on this in the coming weeks.
A Free Tip If You’re Contemplating a Redesign – don’t forget to transfer your blog’s metrics package across to the new template. I learnt this the hard way as I completely forgot to move the Google Metrics Code for 36 hours after the relaunch :-)
