Photo by Melisande*
Introduction
The secret is that you don’t have to hire an expensive blog designer to have a great blog redesign. While it certainly helps and makes the process much easier if you had one to work with, it would still be your responsibility in order to set the overall guidelines for the blog redesign. You need to have a direction when working towards a redesign of your blog. Without any direction you will just end up with a prettier blog (hopefully), which is fun, but does not guarantee that it will make your blog any better.
A great blog redesign starts with a plan. In order to put together a plan for your redesign, you must first reassess your goals, then figure out how well your blog is meeting your goals, and finally asking yourself whether the current design is helping your blog achieve your goals.
Let your goals guide your redesign
If you have ever tried to redesign your blog or anything for that matter, you have probably found your progress halted to a stop by little details such as does this blue or that green look better? This happens when you don’t have goals to guide your overall efforts. Little details will bog you down and slow your progress and even sidetrack you completely from the actual purpose of your redesign. The importance of the answer to whether that blue or green looks better pales in comparison to the answer for the question of whether this change will help you make more money, get more subscribers, or increase page views.
Making visual changes just for the sake of change itself will result in a prettier blog, but that does not necessarily mean a better blog. You can actually make it worst if your redesign is not built with your goals in mind. You can’t hit a target you cannot see.
Just like social media and SEO, your blog design is a tool, a means to an end and not the end in itself. Reassess your goals and allow them to guide your decisions when redesigning your blog. The following are some great resources to help you get started on figuring out your goals and reassessing your current ones:
List of resources
- The Pocket-sized Guide to Blogging
- How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Make Money Online
- Why Do We Blog?
How well is your blog meeting your goals?
This is not about whether or not your current blog design is helping you achieve your goals, because that is the next step. This is about whether or not your current blog is where you want it to be. Is it giving you the exposure that you want? Is it getting you more clients and leads? Are you building a bigger network in which to spread your ideas around?
The answers to these questions will help you determine the goals for your blog redesign. This is different from the goals for your blog as this focuses solely on what you want the blog redesign to be able to accomplish in the end as a result of the blog redesign and nothing else. Increase page views? Get more subscribers? Decrease bounce rate? Increase discussions? Get more leads/clients?
List of resources
- How Can You Measure the Success of Your Blog?
- Social Media Marketing: Numbers Can’t Tell the Whole Story
Is your blog design helping you achieve your goals?
In order to figure out whether your blog design is helping you or not, you must really take a second look at your blog design. After that, take another 3-4 looks, seriously. As humans our brains are programmed in such a way that information that doesn’t change much, often just gets ignored completely by our mind even if we see them everyday. This is why we can do something everyday and not notice something until someone points it out to us or for some reason we were forced to pay attention to it. So when was the last time you really took a look at the design of your sidebar, footer, headlines, or comments?
If you are like most people, it was probably a long time ago. And who can blame you, as bloggers we get caught up with writing the next best article, promoting the crap out of it in social media outlets, and figuring out other methods to achieve our goals that we end up overlooking our own blog design. We no longer see the widgets we stuffed into the sidebar at the last minute, the links that no one ever clicks on in the footer, or that hideous rss button in the corner. Everything becomes a blur and your blog design suffers because it certainly doesn’t get better on its own.
So how do you figure out whether or not a blog design is helping you achieve your goals? It is pretty simple, as you go through your blog design keep in mind that any visual element that is not helping you achieve your goals is hurting it.
Conclusion
In the end, you should have a much better plan and direction for your blog redesign. Whether you take this to a blog designer or do it yourself does not matter as the end blog redesign will be that much better now that you invested time into a solid plan. If you are doing it yourself, then the next article is for you. It will focus on how to approach the redesign process after you got a plan.
22 comments
great post. I just finished a small redesign of my blog and posted an article about one of the coding issues I ran in to. You can check it out over at http://www.kylesteed.com/redesign.
Great article. Thanks.
When I went to do the major redesign of my blog that I’m still slowly scraping together I did have very clear guidelines. Wanted to make it clearer, easier to read, with better and more information in the sidebar, wanted to make it more me and yes, I even made the commenting form something awesome.
But when I look at the new design now I notice that knowing what you want doesn’t do that much good if you’re not a very great designer and can’t make it look as awesome as it looks in your head
Excellent article, it really does pay to focus on your goals when you set out to redesign, harder yet is the ability to remain focused once you have gotten pas the initial stages of the redesign.
And on the topic of overlooking ones own design, I mashed together some quick design changes at one time and hustled along to stay on top of a few client projects. It wasn’t until two weeks later that I noticed I had some pretty serious issues in IE7. That was a mistake I don’t hope to revisit, I try to pay much more attention to my own blogs these days.
Nice work, great article!
When I tweak myself I mostly change small things (and more often cutting and not adding). It’s not really goals, just attempts to make parts of blog easier to use or more informative.
I have some areas that need total remake (eventually) so I’ll try to set “big” goals when I get to that (unlikely to do it myself).
@Kyle Steed: Nice redesign, has a much better contrast now between background and content. Glad you found a solution to your problem, I know I have run into quite a few myself and stepping away from it usually helps as well.
@Swizec: Yes, sometimes getting that design we have pictured in our head onto a design and then into code can be a lot harder than we thought at first.
@Jeremy: Tell me about it, I spent a whole day just working out all the kinks in different IE versions so it looks nice on all browsers. Was well worth the effort.
@Rarst: I used to tweak a lot, and I still do, but after a while all the tweaks don’t look uniform because they were done at different times with different purposes. Good luck on your future redesign!
Great post - I would add another useful tip: Keep notes about your next design!
This means bookmarking inspiring website designs and writing down your ideas about what you want to do with your next design - before you actually sit down to make it.
With this technique, by the time you are about to begin a new redesign you’ll have a plethora of ideas & inspiration to finish the project.
AND another tip! (I recently finished my blog redesign too so I’m fresh with ideas) - sometimes the best design ideas come during your sleep. I find that if I goto bed thinking about my new site design my sleepy mind will almost always come up with some really cool ideas (in which case I recommend you get out of bed to write them down less you forget by the morning).
—Schwabe
Have no strategic goals in redesigning. Just pure satisfaction.
Plus splashes of inspiration here and there for the readers.
Please check out mine?
Thanks for writing!
Interesting post here. I think it is hard for most people to take a step back and review their site objectively. For me it is always good to ask others for feedback or suggestions. And if you have some success you can ask your readers.
when redesigning anything i always like to set out clear goals like you have mentioned then look at the available technology from javascript to flash and then see which i really should use and make sure i don’t look at anything else once i started the design process else i can get into way too much and end up confusing the design.
have to disagree with the comment that you should not have any strategic goals when redesigning.
i think its just a matter of knowing what your goals are - if you have none then cool redesign as you see fit. Sadly not all of us are able to just let the inner designer loose all the time without other strategic or commercial consideration
Great Blog, I’m interested in adding you to my blog roll. If I add you will you add me? I plan on stopping by often
http://www.Napoleonhillslaw.com
Yours truly
Allen Loomis
Hey man great article and I love the templates you make i’m a big fan.
http://www.filefreaks.com
For sure I’ll put a link on my website. Great work!!!
Great job on Designredux. The theme looks great. I can’t wait to give it a try. By the way, this blog looks excellent too. You have some serious design chops.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for this, I was thinking about some ways I might redesign my blog. These are great tips, I will keep them in mind. The design of this site is beautiful as well I might add.
Redesigning according to your goals is def. important. If you want to eventually monetize your blog or at least try you will have to consider this into the design.
I think it is important to ask your readers how they feel about your blog redesign.
You see the readers are important for your blog, so theirs opinion might help you to keep your blog successful or not.
Cheers
Great article on blog redesign- and yes, I agree that it’s important to ask your readers how they feel about your blog redesign also. It’s easy enough to change things online, especially with the better blog software like WordPress.
We’re in the middle of a big redesign right now, so thank you again for these tips!
Hi!….
I was searching on internet and I found your web design blog…..it is really interesting…keep it up….look forward to read more from you
very informative post and some very good ideas to think about
Design is really a big problem for me. It take a day or more. And the result “not bad”
So, my domain is just sit here before I finish my blog design
Thanks mate for the article just finished redesigning my blog now it looks a lot nice and easier to read
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