Web Designer Dave Redesign V2

September 7, 2011 Articles | Trends, Workflow

There are many reasons why web sites need to be redesigned from time to time — improving calls to actions and visitor interactions, a need to rearrange the content hierarchy, a change to the aesthetics and so on. The main reasons why I decided to redesign Web Designer Dave was because I got bored of the old design, I wanted to play with some more up-to-date front-end development techniques, to create a more unorthodox site that would function better than the old version, and to drive down the site’s bounce rate by offering users more relevent navigational links.

Web Designer Dave Pages

Here is a comparison of the old and new Web Designer Dave web site pages.

Home Page

The old home page had a list of recent posts, with the layout the same to archive and search pages. I wanted to make the characteristic’s this page more distinctive. The new version still has a list of recent posts, but they are now arranged by category (articles, tutorials, quick tips) and has a different layout to archive and search pages. Recent posts display a small thumbnail when avalible and the post title — making it quick for the visitor to scan, these are contained with in a div which is nested within an anchor tag (HTML5 allows us to do this now).

Old Web Designer Dave home page

New Web Designer Dave home page

About Page

I have decided to scrap the about page for the redesign because I felt there isn’t really enough unique information to have its own page. Instead I have placed a short description of the site in the header for the home and search pages, and a little bit of about information in the site’s footer, Which will link to my online portfolio site.

Old Web Designer Dave about page

Category Pages

Not much has changed with the category pages apart from the aesthetics, and there is no longer a description of the category under the category title — It has been moved to the header adjacent the navigation.

Old Web Designer Dave category pages

New Web Designer Dave category pages

Single Post Pages

The changes to single post pages include…

No commenting — too much spam and time spent moderating for a small amount of real comments.
Instead of previous and next post links, I have created a relevent posts widget to be placed at the bottom of the post. If there are no related posts a random post bottom I created will appear in it’s place.
Social media sharing has been limited to the end of the posts because thats where the clicks were coming from. Also I have limited sharing to only Google +, Twitter, and facebook networks because these were the only buttoms being used, and it reduces page loading times.
Also at the bottom of posts I have added a little bit of author information.