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ReveNews Ready To Go Under The Design Knife Again One Year Later
About this time last year I launched the current ReveNews design you see right now. It’s been a year now, and while I’m still ok with the look and feel here, I always knew the design change I put forth was a quick fix. In other words, we can do better, and better we will.
So today officially marks the day I start really thinking about how ReveNews is going to look in the future. Here are some of my thoughts.
1. We need to start from scratch and move to Wordpress. Why? Because our MT installation is complex and custom and very difficult to make changes too.
Problems with this idea? Well, the very nature in how we are setup is an issue. Our folder structure (/jimkukral) is something I don’t think we can do in Wordpress, mabye I’m wrong, but I haven’t figured that out yet. Anyone? Plus if we move to WP we lose basically every engine indexed page (thousands and thousands). I know we can do redirects, but I also know the effects could be disasterous to our rankings.
2. The layout needs to be cleaner and less newsy. The design you’re looking at was my vision of combining www.huffingtonpost.com with more of a traditional blog format. Again, our setup as a group blog makes things very difficult in that we have to have a home page that aggregates all the writing from each author, while still maintaining their archives in their own directory.
3. I’d like each author to have a bit of control over their own page. Like being able to change colors, add links, move some stuff around. Of course, not affecting the outside shell, just their content and bio area. Tall order, I know. But I think our bloggers would like that, and the readers would be able to feel more at home inside each blogger’s space.
4. I want the home page to be flowing, yet readable for a lot of content. Techcrunch does this well. But again, Techcrunch doesn’t have 40+ authors, so they don’t have to worry about content being pushed off the home page. We can have up to 10 blog entries a day sometimes, then nothing for a few days. It’s important that the traffic that visits the home page can see that there is new content from each blogger, or they may miss it. Or maybe there’s a simple way in the new design to showcase recent entries “you may have missed”. The Blog Herald does this now.
5. Check out this online magazine I found the other day. How nice and readable is that? I love it.
Final Thoughts…
So now I need to begin the process of hiring a designer. If you’re up to the challenge, please contact me via email at jimkukral at revenews dot com. I’m looking for someone with a vision, and who understands the challenges we face in this redesign and who wants to do something unique and creative, but still very readable and “bloggy”. And of course, I’m only looking for seasoned veterans with an extensive portfolio of top-quality work.
Note: Feel free to leave positive ideas and suggestions for the new design in the comments below. I’m really not interested in negative comments about the current design, those will be deleted. But if you have some good ideas or examples that can help, please share them.
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Jim,
Don’t do it. The site looks great, people like it, and search engines love it. If it ain’t broke…
Adam
I have to agree with Adam on this as well, Jim. People use and enjoy revenews because of its simplicity and straightforward design. Sure, maybe the technical back end could use some upgrades (although from an author’s POV it’s pretty clean).
Dave
I hear what you are saying, but, there is always room for improvement. I neglected to mention some details about new “stuff” we’ll be launching at ReveNews in the next few months, and a new design will be key in helping me promote those things.
Also, from a technical standpoint, the site is a bear to work with. It takes me way too long to setup a new blogger, and we can do a much, much better job of navigation, especially into the categories.
Maybe we won’t do it, but I’m certainly going to explore it.
I hear you Jim,
I experienced first hand some of the issues. Yes, they are more related with the management of the site (admin) and the labor involved to make it work as nicely as it does today. “Little Elves” have to spend way to much manual labor that visitors can see the results of those efforts.
Streamlining, automation and splitting the work load are the main things (e.g. need to add a link to your bio page? sure go ahead, DO IT YOURSELF
). Those are critical though. Back ends are always more complex than the simple front-end. The Front-end is so simple and consistent because of the complex back-end. Here lies the issue. Same changes in the Back-end are simple and no issue, others have to make you re-think if the current home-grown version is worth the effort to re-do or change or if there might be something out there that gets close to what you want eventually, more flexible, supporting new technologies = ready for the future and faster to implement than re-building the old system.
Jim: I would do the 301-redirects. It’s a pain, I know, I did that just recently. The content that used to be all at Cumbrowski.com is now on 3 domains. Cumbrowski.com, Cumbrowski.de and RoySAC.com. I used Folders too and that did actually help me with the redirects. We can chat about it when it becomes an item on your Agenda.
Jim,
Ditto to what Adam said.
Sure, explore it and perhaps look at some very high end CMS systems unless these scripts would get you banned from the Blogger Hall of Fame :). Seriously, I can’t recall names but their are some very very high end CMS systems.
Continued best wishes
Come over to Drupal. http://drupal.org
Drupal can do anythinging Wordpress does and more.
Just see Performancing.com to get a good idea of how far it can go…
Yes, put it under the knife. If get gets rid of template errors and comment errors which I’ve seen this week alone. Different from putting my posts in mod, that’s a different kind of error