Today I have spent the afternoon developing my design for the new year in a stage to reach my ambitious goal with publishing 365 posts. I am currently 3 posts behind after 10 days but I am sure to catch up since I got a slow start.
Less is More
The main idea behind my new design is the classic less is more. By removing my sidebars and its information I am shifting the focus to what’s important; my knowledge. Instead of wasting your attention on unimportant menus, polls, Twitter and Last.fm I place my posts in the spotlight.
On the downside I also had to remove all advertising. Even though this is my personal blog where I write about my own projects and I am not trying to make money on it, I was glad to be able to pay for my domain and hosting. I will probably change this later on and add some advertising below my posts.
Informational Greeting
This is something I recommend all of you to use at your blog. Add a box with short information in which you greet the visitor, share something about yourself and summarize what your blog is all about.
Hello and welcome to my blog where I share knowledge on personal development and making money online for free. My name is Stefan and I’m currently studying advertising and communication while running a company on the side. Feel free to read more about me and subscribe for my well worth reading content.
As you can see I also add a few links in the text. They are not only helpful for my visitors but also in terms of search engine optimization since they are high quality deep links from the top of my first page.
Wall of Fame
Just like the greeting box, this information actually deserves to be a own post. When it comes to blogs a majority of all visitors are interested in who the author are, even though they might have just found you through a search engine. Therefore you should take advantage of this and expand your about me-page to also show your favourite posts.
If you head over to mine you will see that I not only share information about myself but also lists my favourite posts, quotes and guest posts. Later on I will add a photo but my last one is 2 years old and needs to be updated.
Your Thoughts
After working with a design for a few hours you need to get a second opinion since you get stuck in the same route. Therefore I would love to hear your opinion on the new design. What can I do to improve it?
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow! Extremely minimalistic! It might take me a couple of visits to get used to it.
Personally, I don’t like the minimalist concept. Some sites get carried away with ads and such, but the sidebars also have useful information that the reader can use, like navigation through categories and tags, recent or popular posts, blogrolls (I am constantly discovering new sites through other blogrolls) etc…
I also don’t like a site to be so narrow, seems to make it harder to read for me. I understand the need for this for mobile browsers, but there are plugins available now to make a site mobile optimized (i am still testing a few).
Of course, this is just my opinion, and it won’t stop me from returning here
I appreciate your critique Keith. Personally I never use categories and tags on my blogs since I prefer to create my own collections such as the page about niche sites but I agree with you that blogrolls, recent- and popular posts are a good idea to show. Do you think it would be possible to add those in the footer or do I need a sidebar?
I’m looking forward to seeing more of you and I actually ended up subscribing for your blog thanks to your comments.
I hadn’t thought of that Stefan, actually that is a great idea to put extra information in the footer, that way you keep the disign simple and not take away from the content.
Looks good man!
I like the new design – it certainly focuses the user on the content and removes distractions.
I Support This Step Taken by You. Infact I used the same thing for 5 Months. user get nothing but the Content.
But, You Need atleast one sidebar.
How did your readers react on the change?
Wow.. That too small in width without any sidebars & extra stuff.
hi ,Stefan this is my first comment in your blog, happy to do so.
This Design is also good but when you provide blog archive in the top links it may be helpful to first time visitors.
If you can provide better navigation even with this design it may look awesome.I think you were the first who choose only the posts to show in a blog.
Sorry for out of topic
can you spare a second to visit my little post on “success”
I used to have an archive-link but I felt it was a bit difficult to find good posts since it’s only a long list. Now I divide them into sections and list all of my sections under the about me page. I’m currently testing different methods to add a simple sidebar.
I love new design, look simple but easy to follow
Thank you Tinh.
I like this slim look very much when I first saw it on a blog some weeks back.
It’s good to see that your blog has also become ads free which is slowly becoming a trend.
It will most certainly not be add free forever since I need to make a living of what I do but it feels great to have a add free site for a while. Hopefully I will come up with an idea to make money without showing to many ads.