designfeedr

I’ve chosen to give Designfeedr a totally new look. Since the Blog is growing and getting more and more returning readers I thought it was time that the ease of use and amount of features of the blog grew as well. I chose to go with the “Fresh news” theme by Woo themes, in my opinion the most professional premium themes creator out there at them moment.

What was wrong with the old design?
The old design had some really strong points but also some very obvious weak spots in my opinion. The main page was totally image based with no text-excerpts from the post itself. On the one hand this is something that appeals to the design loving audience, they are image minded after all. From a more practical and usability perspective this does mean that users only have your image and headline to judge whether or not the post is something they’d want to see. With a more traditional blog design like the one I am using now a reader can also read the excerpt and have some more info before committing to click and read the post. The extra text information is of course also very good for search engine optimization, google wasn’t giving the old main page a lot of love because it lacked any real content in it’s view.

Another thing the old design lacked was good navigation to keep the user on the blog. The main page was crystal clear, but navigating older posts or finding stuff on a certain topic was a lot harder than on other blogs. This is a shame since there might be some interesting articles for readers in the archive that they might never see. The new theme solves this by having multiple ways to find posts placed at different places in the design, you can browse by category, tag, search results, featured posts, most popular posts or just view the archive.

Why a pre made theme if you’re a web designer?
While I have the knowledge and experience to be able to code my own Wordpress theme from scratch I also know very well how much work goes into creating and testing a feature rich theme like the one I’m using now. Since I have my personal life (read : shopping hungry girlfriend with a daughter!) and other responsibilities I just don’t have the time to spend one/two months developing a professional theme. So instead I chose to look for the best possible premium theme out there and focus on the content of the blog instead.

What I’d love to hear from you guys
Apart from if you dig the new theme I’d like to ask you two questions. The first is if you’d like the font size to be slightly bigger for articles? The second is real simple : What would you like to see (more of) at Designfeedr. More showcases, more spotlights with creatives, more articles featuring input from pro’s or are you looking for freebies and resources? Anything else? Let me know I’ll make it happen.

Edit : There are a few things I’m still working on at the moment. One is the inserting of images into the featured posts, which seems to be a waiting game since the Wordpress plug-in that makes this possible doesn’t work on the latest version I installed two days ago (If only I’d known!). So if the blog looks a bit boring, bear with me, I’ll be fixed soon.