Weblog Redesign?
My mother recently pointed out that she enjoys the humor and life portions of my weblog, but is bored by the deep ones. In addition, I’d already been thinking that I needed to perform a little redesign magic on the site since I’ve been riding along with a thieved version of Zeldman’s site.
So I’m thinking about getting my money’s worth out of Typepad and setting up a few additional blogs to serve as "channels". I know that sounds completely silly. And yes, I know that those who want to could filter by category. However, I think the channel blog idea has some merit. She can subscribe to my "Life" blog and be spared by other deep-thinking. My buddies and my step-dad can subscribe to the "Sports" blog. And everyone else can enjoy the more branded professional blog.
I’d like to tie all this together under my main domain name, www.billeisenhauer.com, so I’m thinking of wrapping these blogs and a few other assorted pages together under a coordinated design. That’s actually not a trivial undertaking since I have to delve into the Advanced Template Design features of Typepad and pretty much roll my own blog markup and CSS. I’m up for the challenge, but it begs the question:
After everyone visits once and resubscribes, who will ever see the design anyway?
If most of you are like me, you have an RSS reader and you read posts straight off of there. You rarely enjoy the site design itself. So should you think much about the design of your weblogs?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes for all of us. All of you web designers out there must take special care. Not only is it your branding, but its a part of your work portfolio. For me, an application architect, entrepreneur, and a few things otherwise, it represents extra polish on my evolving personal brand. So while I could short-arm the design, I probably will not.
So hopefully in a month or less, I’ll be able to let you know that the site has a new look. At that point, you can enjoy my XHTML for once.