When I started doing web design in 1999 with nothing to guide me but a B.A. in History and 21 years of drawing Batman in the margins of class notes, well, let’s just say I muddled through. Lucky me, this was way back when the internet was spelled with a capital ‘I‘ so any warm body with a copy of Teach Yourself Photoshop in 24 Hours could get decent work.
I’ve learned a few things since then, the most important being that you don’t start with typography and color.
You start by solving a problem.
My blog had 2 big problems:
- High bounce rate/Low conversion rate
- Unclear value proposition
Suck. These are the outcomes I wanted instead:
- Visitors not bouncing, but falling in love and subscribing. If you’re not big enough to generate your own gravity with the social proof of hundreds of comments on every post, then you’ve gotta win them over the old fashioned way, valuable stuff in a slick package.
- Potential clients realizing I’m the web designer they’ve been looking for their whole lives.
To achieve those goals, I did the following:
- Added a “start here” sidebar area with “Greatest Hits” and “Hire Me” sections. I’m still refining it, but any “start here” area is better than nothing. If you do nothing else to improve your visitor retention, add a “start here”. For inspiration check out nerd rocker Jonathan Coulton’s “start here” area. Everything you need to know about him is there plus his highest value content, i.e. his greatest hits.
- Clarified my purpose. I use my name for my URL because that was the best way to ensure I’d never half ass this blog. It’s a good long term strategy because I fully intend this blog to be a catalog of my life’s work, but my name isn’t great for SEO and by itself it doesn’t say anything about what’s going on here. To fix that I pulled my name in the logo way back, and punched my new tagline way up.
- Finally established a brand beyond “high contrast readability with no branding”. The previous design was a sort of repudiation of my old consulting site’s inauthenticity, but just saying no to things isn’t enough. You have to stand for something. Everything felt right as soon as I incorporated my abstract art into the header. Even the logo looks hand drawn. As I said on Twitter, the beautiful uncertainty of improvisational art, sort of like an artistic quantum mechanics, speaks to me.
- Floating tiles for the win. I’ve got a strong urge to “chunk” designs as I did in my personal projects Newshutch and GTDTiddlyWiki. I scroll quickly and the previously non-obvious division between posts drove me nuts. Pagination used to be at the top and bottom of pages, but now you can page quickly because the click targets are always in the same place.
- Sayonara crappy browsers. Safari and Firefox have CSS rounded corners. IE and Opera get square corners, and IE6 doesn’t get the footer pagination nav. When everything is legible, accessible, and “close enough” I stop worrying about cross browser display. Readers who only use one browser won’t know the difference, and anyway putting off IE5-using potential clients is a feature, not a bug.
- Special favicon mention: Favicons should be 16×16 slices of heaven, and I love my new one as well as my iPhone “add to home screen” icon. Spotting them in the midst of other favicons should be no problem.
Comments on the new design are very welcome, I’m especially interested in advice on improving my visitor to subscriber conversion rate as well as pre-qualifying clients. What’s your opinion?
7 Comments ↓
Looks great! I like your solution of making your name less of a focal point just by using a darker color (he had it bright white in one of the mockups and I suggested removing it all together… which I’m still a fan of btw.) Maybe you should show some of the unused designs, the evolution. I liked seeing how the “sometimes pagination links” messed with your headline placement.
Yeah, I plan to show some screenshots of discarded ideas and talk about more changes I want to make. It’s all a process, and I’ve gotten some great ideas from people in email.
Funny that nobody wanted to go on the record in comments, it was all via the email back channel. And it wasn’t like they were sparing my feelings, almost everything was positive, and I asked to hear about stuff I could do better.
Thanks for looking at design drafts BTW. If anyone out there is looking for a top notch web developer, Micah’s your guy. He built Making the Chain soup to nuts by himself.
Nathan — New site design is great, my blog is jealous. I like how the header is “attached” to top edge of brower window, and your big RSS button. Nice spacing on everything, use of negative space, etc. You’re kicking ass! ;)
Nathan,
I like your redesign, its much more usable, and I like the way it was purpose oriented. My main criticism would be your tagline. It just a little generic, everyone wants to be that “translator” “manager” “middleman”- thats what I wanted my blog to be about- while I enjoy your blog, I feel like its not really about demystifying technology. I don’t know- with that said , you are on my feed reader, because you are useful, brief and interesting.
May want to read this:
http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/the-webs-dirty-little-secret/
Thanks Benjamin.
I can write other people’s taglines, but of course I agonized over mine. It’s a work in progress. How would you sum up “I’m a web designer/blog consultant/aspiring abstract artist/talented generalist with a whole mess of opinions on technology, economics, and culture, and my reason for writing here is that technology is made too hard for normal people and clients so I like to help them.”
In 5 words or less. :-)
Well, it would depend on what the purpose of your blog is- this one is a start: Potential clients realizing I’m the web designer they’ve been looking for their whole lives.
But, be more specific:
- Who is that client? (make of a name, persona, to visualize it- it may be only one of the 100 people that sees your blog, but that is the one that matters)
- What one “thing” do you want that person to know?
- What one “thing” do you want that person to do?
Then, try to duplicate that interaction over and over
Another random thought- what ONE thing are you really good at. James White doesn’t have to call MTV, they call him. He didn’t have to ask Kayne to post a blog about him.
“Be so good, they can’t ignore you.” The more I dig into the purpose of my blog, the more I dig into the purpose of my life.
With that said- keep creating, its a form of thinking out loud (perhaps), and sometimes I find its my path to self discovery. :)
I love how simple and effective this site is. I’m very impressed with the design.