Do you like the new blog redesign? I decided to do a new blog redesign because my blog was loosing its touch, so I wanted to re do the design once again and turn my blog community into a social community. There are several new things on this blog which I think will help with the readership and the attention span of users.
First of all, it is back to a 2 column traditional blog redesign. Prior I had a 3 column template and I thought it would be great for real estate purposes, not so well. Second, I made the home page more accessible to other content. Meaning more content is readily more accessed, giving opportunity for old posts to be discovered.
Lastly, there are several new social aspects to the sites that I have implmented...
- Home page Youtube channel - this is running a custom youtube rss feed which is dynamic and auto updates itself every time I upload a new video. This gives my readership new content when I upload anything new on youtube.
- Instagram Feed - I have an instagram feed which will be going live today, still working out the kinks. The purpose of this feed is to also provide entertainment while users read. Almost interact with me in a virtual way, seeing where I am and what I am doing. This will replace the flickr feed but not as a full photo album.
- Read Next Plugin - I have a new plugin made for me which suggests a posts to the end user when they reach the end of the blog posts. Have you seen Mashable's recommended blog posts slider when you reach the end of the article? Same concept.
- Share Bar - I have implemented a share bar to every blog posts, taking advantage of social buttons and shares. This should help with increase of shares and likes.
- Making social buttons more prominent. Again, I want this blog to be a social community, so I try to utilize these social buttons as engagement tools. I have implemented Facebook insight into my site, so I can see users who are logged into Facebook and see how they interact and who they share.
Also, one powerful aspect I am now using is the use of StudioPress Genesis Framework. This theme is actually a child theme now and I def enjoy using the Framework that I have a stamp of usage on every blog posts below the comments. The 'Brian' team did a great work and everyone at StudioPress.
Another attribute is you will now see a recent project on the home page, I am doing so many new things I want everyone to know what I have been up to. I wish I can literally just multiple myself, but I have a great team working with me. One I want to extend my virtual handshake to is my programmer, who has learned and turned this theme into a Genesis Child. He also developed 90% of my softwares and plugins for my marketing needs as well. So great work and props to him.
Lastly, I want to also thank Dukeo Media for allowing to use my caricature from his Who is Ian Fernando blog post. It was a great addition to the blog design and it definitely shows my personality. His blog posts definitely depicted me very well from the first time I started to where I am at today.
If there are any flows that you see within this blog let me know, let me know your thoughts on the blog as well. While Affiliate Summit is just a couple days away, I will be tweaking and adjusting some things on the blog to make sure it is perfected.
Hopefully this will be the last redesign for a couple years.
