News, Articles and Case Studies

09 Jan 2008

Blog Makeover

Happy New Year to you all! Hope you all had a fun time.

As always at the start of a new year, it is a time for reflection, taking stock and starting afresh with new ideas. I am hoping that 2008 will bring new exciting challenges and adventures for the Deckchair team. One of the main things on our ‘TO DO List’ is to redesign our blog. It is rather uninspiring to look at and it is a bit shameful that it has taken us 6 months to get round to thinking about it.

There are lots of things I think we should include aside from the obvious much needed asthetic redesign. And of course it goes without saying that I would be most grateful for any advice or suggestions from any of you:

  1. Add in the Dofollow plugin as Randa Clay mentions in her I follow blog. It will give more incentive to visitors to leave comments as the search engines will recognise the link.
  2. Make it more obvious which of the Deckchair team is writing each post by adding an author picture at the top of the post. (might have to do a bit of arm twisting on that one, designers are so shy!)
  3. Add a community panel (if that is what it is called?) so that recent visitors and commentors can be seen and can see each other. As on Paul Enderson’s blog Reflections.
  4. Add a counter that clocks the number of times each blog post is viewed. This is mainly for my benefit as I don’t get many comments at the moment and it will make me feel better if I see that lots of people have at least looked at it. :)
  5. Add a ‘popular articles’ list down the side of the blog to make it easier for people to get to the good stuff.
  6. Add the similar posts plugin as suggested in David Airey’s blog Top 5 essential wordpress plugins.
  7. Make it easier to subscribe to the blog.
  8. Some of these plugins look interesting on Elliot Swan’s wordpress plugins worth having blog. But still working my way through understanding what most of them are!
  9. Search function of some sort to help people find what they are looking for.

I am sure that this list will grow and change as we start the makeover process so watch this space! Again, if you have any useful tips or suggestions we would be most grateful :)

Toni

  • http://randaclay.com Randa Clay

    Lots of good ideas Toni! The similar posts plugin is a great one, and helps to keep readers on your site. I have a quick guide to adding popular posts to your sidebar on my site if you’re interested. Regarding a “counter”, do you use some sort of site statistics program? PMetrics (link in the sidebar of my site) is a great one, as well as Google Analytics. Best of luck in the new year!

  • toni

    Thanks Randa
    your ‘quick guide to adding popular posts to your sidebar’ is great, Thanks for that.
    We do use Google Analytics so I know that people are reading my blog, which is good. What I meant by the ‘counter’ is an actual number on the top of each post showing how many views it has had, sorry I didn’t explain that one very well at all. I guess it must be a plugin. Still trying to decide wether it is a good idea to show this on the site or not?
    Thanks again
    Toni

  • http://www.trulyace.com/blog Amanda Vlahakis

    I do think it’s a good thing if a business blog can match the style of main business web site, that way the reader feels as though they are still on the website of the business.

    What I’m having concerns about at the moment is that I want to develop a new web design that isn’t so ‘boxy’ in shape but I know that my wordpress blog isn’t going to match it properly even when the template is changed to match the site design. Simply because the new site isn’t a boxy shape and a blog needs to be a boxy shape.

    This bothers me quite a bit, but I’m not sure if it’s something I should worry too much about or not.

  • toni

    Hmmmm, it’s a tricky one…so many people have turned their websites into their blogs so that they become one and the same thing, I see how that can work for some. Would you consider that?
    I don’t think it would work for us but at the moment our blog looks like a sad after thought and doesn’t match our main site. Hopefully it will be sorted soon and look much better but we were thinking of making it more graphicy and less photographic in style so it still won’t match. Perhaps they don’t have to match too exactly if they are going to remain seperate.
    Do you think?
    Toni

  • http://www.trulyace.com/blog Amanda Vlahakis

    Yes, for instance David Aireys site is an example of a designers website that is essentially entirely a blog.

    I like to sit between the two extremes in that I want my blog to look like the main site so swapping between the two seems seamless, but I wouldn’t want my entire site be just the blog.

    I personally like an exact match where it’s possible because I don’t want the blog to be thought of as ‘seperate’ from my site, I want it to be fully integrated as a ‘part of’ my site.

    But with my new site design I’m going to have to except that they aren’t going to match very well, but I’ll try my best.

  • http://randaclay.com Randa Clay

    Actually the Popularity Contest plugin will show you how many views each post has had. I don’t know that showing that information on the blog is that useful to the reader though. Part of that plugin is the ability to show the relative popularity of the post at the bottom of each. I removed that though, because again, I don’t believe it’s useful for the reader.

  • toni

    Amanda,
    I’m sure you will find a way, and it will look great :)

    Randa,
    Yes, I think you might be right about that one, so we won’t add it. I suppose I thought it might entice more people to comment if they saw that lots of people had read it. Thanks for the advice :)

    Toni