Has anyone had an entire site redesign? Green is my color, and I designed my green-themed site with a modified Typepad template, and then discovered Pim, who uses nearly the same template. Now that my readership is increasing, I want something that is a little more unique, but I still want people to feel comfortable when they return; we are so visually driven. I usually remember a site as soon as I go back, even if I can't remember the name. I was just wondering if anyone has been through this and can offer suggestions. Also, for anyone using Typepad, if you could offer some advice for a nice photo montage banner, I would love the help; I'd like to keep the site name there, but have the background a photo or series of photos; I think this would be a good place to start.
This post was written by Lisa from Restaurant Widow
4 comments:
What I did was pretty basic in terms of re-design. I found a template for WordPress that I really liked (the Jakarta theme), but then went in and modified the graphics. Most of what I did was just changing the color palate of the various elements, and replaced a few of the elements with others of identical size without changing the layout. The theme is probably recognizable to anyone who is a regular WordPress user, but at the same time, I hope, uniquely mine. I don't know that you need to get a lot fancier than that - content is still most important!
And I thought Typepad has retired my template. :-)
Frankly I don't think yours was all that similar to mine. Chez Pim is based almost entirely on one of the Typepad templates, it's been so long I forgot which one. I only changed a couple of colors. I hardly think the design is mine so don't feel bad that yours looks similar! Although I do agree that having your own look that's different from other existing blogs is a good idea, but when so many of us base our design on templates, it's not surprising that this happened.
cheers,
Pim
I'm in the middle of a huge site redesign and migration to another blogging software. (Blogger doesn't use categories and I sorely want that feature.)
I'll probably recount the experience on my writing blog (not the food one) in a couple of weeks after the launch.
I'm very excited. I hired some professionals to do it and have been very happy so far. Even though I'm a bit of a geek, I didn't want to have to do the migration and programming myself for the launch. I'll be able to tweak as I go though.
I can see how you would be concerned about continuity and wanting to not confuse your readers, but I say go for it. I have redesigned a couple of times in my blog's life, and I have never received anything but a boost from doing those redesigns. Your readers are amazingly resilient and will continue to come back.
If you are concerned about it, consider putting something in your sidebar for the first couple months that says "Restaurant Widow has had a facelift" or something of the sort. Just my opnion.
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