A Few Notes on the New Look

Last night, I launched a redesign of geekforcefive.com. (If you’re reading this by RSS, please come over and check it out.) This morning, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to explain the rationale behind some of the changes I made.

Here’s what I was hoping to accomplish with this redesign.

1. Make the site easier to read by adding more white space
2. Make important navigational elements easier to access
3. Use “advertising” space more wisely

White Space
To accomplish my first goal, the first thing I did was drastically reduce the size of the header image. While I loved featuring Spidey and Silent Bob and all the rest so predominantly, the header image dominated the screen too much. It also took a long time to load, all things considered. So, I chopped the thing in half and came up with a much thinner compromise.

The next decision I made was to reduce the layout from a cramped three-column design to a more spacious two-column design. I repurposed the design I used for echristopherclark.com and changed the color scheme.

By doing those two things, I was able to add a lot more white space into the design. The end-result is that the Website is a lot easier to read.

Navigation
When I designed the first version of geekforcefive.com, I forgot to add space for a search box. That oversight has haunted me ever since. Sure, I was able to pop one in at the bottom of the page, but it was hidden away and I’m sure that hardly anyone thought to look down there for it. I know that I sometimes forgot where it was, so that’s saying something.

So, my first concern with navigation was to make sure the search box was easy to find. I also wanted the links to each news category higher up on the page. And I wanted the link to the about page (previously visitable only by clicking the picture of me in the old sidebar) to be easier to find.

I threw the search box and the category navigation into a horizontal navigation bar, right underneath the new, thinner header, and that part was taken care of. Then, I added a brief blurb to the top of the social networking box that I borrowed from echristopherclark.com, and linked that up to the about page to solve problem #2.

Advertise Wisely
One of the biggest decisions I had to make was what to do about advertising. Since its inception, geekforcefive.com has featured Google AdSense ads in the sidebar. They haven’t done all that well for me, so I decided to scrap them from the sidebar altogether. There were better things I could do with that space, I decided. If I was going to advertise something, why not advertise my book? And why not move the donations box out from the bottom of the sidebar to near the top? It had done more business for me in four months than Google AdSense has done in two years. How much more business might it bring in just by being more visible?

I decided to keep Google ads on the individual article pages by throwing in a horizontal box between the body of the article and the comments section, where I’d occasionally posted them before. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe now that they’re back in the flow of things, they’ll be more useful to readers.

While making my decisions on this front, I spent quite a bit of time reading Colin Devroe’s posts on how he uses advertising.

A Couple More Things...
I decided to put a Share This link on every article page, because it was criminal that I wasn’t making it easy for readers to share my work on their favorite social networking sites.

I also decided to use Gravatar.com to throw avatars into the comments section. I thought that’d be a fun touch. I know not a lot of you visitors are using Gravatar yet, but you should be. It’s dead simple and all it takes is a photo and an e-mail address.

Comments and questions are welcome below.

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