Blog Redesigns

I can help. Very simply, I make it my business to make designers' dreams come true. If you've got a vision, but you don't know how to put it into code, contact me at kaystoner @ yahoo.com to find out what's possible.

But don't just take my word for it. See what I've done for these other folks:

• decor8.blogspot.com
• rollercoast.blogspot.com
• designsponge.blogspot.com
 

First Blog Redesign: decor8.blogspot.com

decor8 has a new look and feel, thanks in large part to the vision of the designer, Holly Becker. Her blog is kickin' some serious butt -- In just 6 weeks she now has 7,500 readers without even advertising. Not bad.

Not bad indeed. I mean, is this a testament to the power of blogging (especially targeted, specific blogging), or what? I'm not sure what's she's done -- must have been a good girl in many, many past lives -- but she's doing it right.


Before:

(more or less - I kinda cobbled together a facsimile of her old site, since we replaced it before I could get the screenshot).

After:



Her blog is now cleaner, brighter, and a visual pleasure to read. Good calls, Holly!

Keys to her success?

Consistency
She updates her work regularly. No slackin' for this chica.

Timely, interesting writing
Great style, very approachable, girl-next-door with a little bit of an edge. Mature, yet vigorously youthful.

A great blog design
Okay, okay, so this is a bit of a plug for me and my coding skills, but the vision was hers, to begin with.

A good designer who gave her a great masthead
She put in a call to her graphic designer homey, and voila -- a new masthead that simply rocks!

A coder who knows what she's doing
This is not a small thing. I just got done with a job for a blogger whose original coder was doing things a-la-1998... lots of tables and spacer gifs and such, and way too much complication. Simplicity is good. Barebones is better. With proper use of CSS, you don't have to go to great lengths to achieve the look you want -- unless, of course, you want rounded corners on all your boxes, which some people do. (That's not bad... it's just a little more work.)

Apparently, there are a lot of designers out there who are visual -- and that's great -- and they don't do code. That's where people like me come in. If you've got issues with your blog design, drop me a line at kaystoner@yahoo.com. Or visit www.sitebasics.net for more details.

But enough about me. How did Holly get this fabulous new blog design?

She started with a good idea of what she wanted to accomplish with her blog -- namely:

• three columns -- adding an extra one for ads or other somesuch
• white background (no dots and no darkness)
• font and link colors

And she dropped me a line, knowing that I'm the sort of hopeless UI geek (read "presentation-layer coder", which is the popular venacular, these days, for those of us who were once "html monkeys"). She told me what she wanted... and what she might want in the future... and I got to work.

She looked around online to see what other blogs she wanted to look like. And she got some great ideas.

A day or so later, when I had something for her to look at, she came up with more great ideas about what to do -- add those dotted lines, tighten things up... you know, the whole "vision thing" (which has a way of eluding our Bush-clan heads of state)... And when all was said and done, we went from this:





to this




Okay, so I know I'm repeating myself here, but I'm very proud of the work we'd done together.

I basically recoded the Blogger template she had, ripping out extraneous code and plugging in new formatting. If you know what you're doing (which I do), it's fun and exciting work. If you don't, it's the kind of thing that will make you insane and wish you'd never started blogging, to begin with. And we can't have that.

(Oh, by the way, Holly's published.)

---

 

Second Blog Redesign: rollercoast.blogspot.com

Mission: Making those pesky blue lines go away and adding new graphics to the masthead.
Before:



After (First Try):



After (Second Try):



This was a tricky one, because one would think that it could be easy to just drop in images into the masthead of your blog. Right? Well, kinda. The CSS on the original template took over a lot of control of the page, with positioning and such, and to make matters worse, the preview of blog posts looked fine, but the final publish left a lot to be desired. So, Jenny Rogers got me on the phone and walked me through her woes.

Turns out, she was better off going with a completely different template, because the first one just didn't give her the flexibility she wanted. I like the lighter green one better, anyway. It's brighter, easier to read, and it lets you drop in the signature graphics with no problemo.

---

 

designsponge.blogspot.com

Mission: Cleaning up the code (HTML and CSS) in a revamped blogger template to make the designer's dream come true.

A very different look, designed by another, started coding by another, then finished off by me.


Before:



After: