One of the great benefits to social media is the instantaneous feedback you can receive from your audience. I would like to implore you as a reader of FUEL LINES to please provide your input for its redesign.
This is a “sneek peak” for the first pass of the redesign. Please let us know your thoughts on the overall look and feel of the design, layout information and any areas we may have missed that you would like to see included.
Jason Ferrell, owner of Natural Logic, a web technology company in Nashville, has been given the responsibility of redesigning my blog. My “baby” is totally in his hands. We will be moving away from the WordPress.com platform to Expression Engine, which will provide a much more flexible, feature rich management system.
I still believe WordPress.com is a great place to start for your agency’s blog. It’s simplicity allows you to concentrate more on writing without getting bogged down from the tech side. Just be sure to own your domain so that you don’t lose traffic should you ever decide to move to another platform in the future. WordPress.com also has an nice export feature will allow you to easily move your blog should you ever want to do so.
The traffic to FUEL LINES is now at the level that I wanted to bring in a someone that I have complete trust and confidence in their technical expertise. This will keep me focused on my most important objective, to provide rich, helpful content for ad agency new business.
Please feel free to share your thoughts in either the comment section below or Email them to me.
Michael,
We are one of your many followers and fans via Twitter. Thanks for all of the great info!
Here is a few general thoughts on your new blog format. Thanks for asking!
1. Visually it feels really busy. Like my eyes struggle to focus on a particular spot and it feels a bit overwhelming.
2. With the colour use the eye is drawn to the ads. Now I know this may be a great thing for the advertisers but I start to feel like it’s an ad site and not as much of a knowledge/content site and that turns us off a bit. Your smart thoughts and comments are what brings us here. We’ll check out your recommendations just because we respect you. Don’t over-sell us.
3.In the “meat-and-potatoes” center section of the page (where all of the good stuff actually is) it feels really crowded and everything seems to blend together. It make it more difficult to read and navigate.
Recos:
1. Open up the information visually a bit. I’m not afraid to scroll down for more but if I feel visually or content overwhelmed I’ll spend less time reading.
2. Tread carefully with your ad space and content balance. If I feel too “sold too” I have less patience to work for content.
3. Work a little bit further with simple colour and spacial relationships to really guide the reader to experience the content in the order you want them to. Look at just the content first and number the priority of importance. Do a print-out of your existing design and turn it upside down and step several feet back (This is so you don’t try to READ the content). Squint just a little and see how your eye travels around the visual weights of the page. Let this test be your guide as how to visually guide your readers through your page.
Kudos for taking the steps to making your blog even better for those of us that read and follow your thoughts! We appreciate the info and hard work!
Respectfully,
Tim Scott
Creative Director @THEMdidit
themdidit.com
Ps. Please be gentle! Our new web site is coming soon as well! 🙂
Hi Michael,
Congrats on the redesign going on and appreciate you opening it up to us for feedback.
The site has great content. But the balance seems off in that there is so much of an emphasis on the content rather than design that it doesn’t flow as easily as it could for me. I feel like it could also benefit from a bolder color that’s still complementary to the light green. The gray and light green feel very muted.
Also, some very simple touches like giving more definition to each space between the major areas (i.e. Topics/Top Posts/Twitter Status) can help break up the eye flow in a good way. Right now, it’s running together a bit too much and that can cause people to miss valuable content here and there.
When the boldest use of colors are used as they currently are, the eye may go quicker than needed to the ads below (this seconds Tim’s commentary above). I don’t think you really want that to happen, especially if it comes at the expense of reading any of the content above.
Make sense? Just one Creative Director’s opinion. Looking forward to the finished product and keep up the great work.
Dan Gershenson
Creative Director
The Creative Underground
http://www.thecreativeunderground.com/blog
Michael,
First off thanks for some create articles and info! I agree with some of the above comments. The site looks a little too busy. Font size and spacing might help. In my opinion I would look into something more like what http://www.mashable.com has. Your articles are great and I think you need to keep that as your focus even on the home page.
Phillip Gallego
Chief Technology Officer
Creative Mindworks
Thanks to all for your valuable comments and feedback. Your comments allow us to make this redesign very “user-centered” to compliment Michael’s excellent content. The initial mockup was a very rough draft. The next mockup will be more refined and incorporate some of your comments and ideas.
Cheers –
Jason
Tim,
Great feedback. Exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. It is very much appreciated.
Dan,
Your comments made perfect sense. They are very helpful. Thanks!
Thanks Joe. Your comments are very helpful.