How I Re-Design My Blog
So, every so often I do a re-design or I take my current theme and redo it based on what I think needs to be updated and what I feel like changing. Every single time, however, I notice that there are some things that I do to make sure the process goes through smoothly and usually I never have to go back to test it and I figured I’d blog about certain things I do and keep in mind while re-designing a new theme.
1) Keep Resolutions in Mind – No..no.. I’m not talking about your New Years resolutions but screen resolutions because that will help you in ensuring that your blog design looks and fits well in the most common screen resolutions out there (generally, 1024×768)
2) Graphics Load Time - I always try to maintain a load time for my pages to a certain amount of time. If it goes over, then I usually try to either reduce the graphical content or I try to compress some of the smaller, less important graphics but while you design your blog you should keep this in mind.
3) Focus on Content – I always try to find ways to attract the readers attention towards the content. As you can see, the design is quite simple on the side that the content is present because I want to present the content and information and focus on that, not on any types of images or anything.
4) Always Test Changes – I always try and test the changes I make on a dummy blog before I apply them to the actual blog and even then I make sure it works on different browsers for compatibility since I try to make the transition process smooth for everyone.
5) Back up – Lastly, yet, most importantly, always, ALWAYS create a backup. Most of us have learned the hard way that having a back up is more important than anything because once you lose something, its gone, unless you have a back up. So always save your work and your previous work as well!
Well, thats all for today folks! I hope you enjoyed another one of my list style posts! I will have another update shortly!
These are all excellent tips to think about when redesigning your blog, especially your point about backing everything up! I also learned the hard way a couple years back and trust me, you do NOT want to go through what I had to…ugh..I hate even thinking about it! lol
So lets move on shall we…
I think another important aspect to think about when redesigning your blog is to keep your Readers in mind as well. It’s all about user experience and if you do stuff to hinder it (make it hard to navigate, have too many ads or ads in the wrong places)it will turn off your current and potential readers, and it will be hard to win them back. So always do some tests before you launch and even have friends or family try it out and see what they think about the U.E.
That’s it for my two sense…I look forward to seeing your new design!
Agreed! Great points, especially on focusing on the content man!
Backup…boy don’t I know about that one lol.
Attraction of blog all depends on Content, Design or Graphics as you told backup policy which i like the most, not many care about backup need to consider.
You guys make me worried about my half-assed backing up job. I really should get around to doing a more complete job.
You made some very good points that you have to consider with a site redesign. Another thing you should be checking is cross browser & operating system compatibility. Most of us probably know how differently Internet Explorer and Firefox can display even simple html elements.
Question, How would you test if there is many visitors visiting our website?
Maybe we need to inform visitors
“Sorry for inconvenience that we are testing and re-design the site” ???
Hi there,
There are a quite a few more points that you might want to consider when re-designing your blog or website.
Cheers,
Eddie Gear
Recognise some of the steps I’ve just gone through in my own site redesign. I knew I needed help with the design work (and am so glad I got it) but there were some bits like re-writing of the structural stuff, the entry points, that I had to do myself.
i do some tweaks and if some changes of my site or blog design but i am not that good on making overall changes in design stuff as to make it more unique. but those were good points and well explained, i will try to do some changes to my blog following and keeping those points in mind
will keep those points in mind while having my blog design remake. already have note down those points. Thanx for the tips
Sometimes it’s really that simple, isn’t it? I feel a little stupid for not thinking of this myself/earlier, though.
Ah backing up, I like many I fear learned about that one the hard way. I made some changes to one of my blogs and really messed up some of my MySQL databases so I pretty much lost three months work because I forgot to make back ups. Never again!