Refreshing design

A Bank Holiday weekend is a good quiet time for a web project and to roll out a new look to NevilleHobson.com.

The look and feel of a website – whether it’s a blog like this one or a corporate site like any you can think of – is a key element in the overall experience someone enjoys (or not) when they come to your presence on the web. It plays a role in your brand presence, whether it’s personal or corporate. (Ask Jakob Nielsen about web usability.)

In thinking about the reader experience, the focus in my mind was on putting the content front and centre. Consuming content in a blog or wherever else primarily ought to be about that: what the consumer experiences and whether that experience is worthwhile for him or her.

With that in mind, I present the new NevilleHobson.com.

Lots of white space, a pleasing serif typeface for the text, an overall uncluttered look.

The new look is a bit of a departure from the busy, newsroomy one it’s replaced.

The major feedback I’d had about the old look was in reference mostly to the typeface – sans-serif and too small – and how cluttered everything seemed to be. It largely reflected my own thoughts, too.

Both the new and old looks are WordPress child themes  – eleven40 and News respectively – that run on the Genesis Framework. I installed and enabled them myself.

With the new look, what you see is pretty much out of the box. I’ve made a few changes and tweaks here and there, mainly in the CSS. There will probably be a bit more tweaking in due course.

The structure of the site has not changed although I have simplified the navigation menu system, getting rid of a lot of clutter there, and retired some out-of-date content (static pages, not blog posts). I’ve also removed the background image that appeared every time you loaded a page. It looked nice but it had a huge negative impact on page-load times.

Importantly, I wanted to continue the responsive web design aspect of this blog that the Genesis Framework developers have made easy. It works well on whatever device on which you access it – whether it’s a 24-inch widescreen desktop monitor, an iPad or other 10-inch tablet, a Kindle Fire or other 7-inch tablet, or any modern smartphone with their 3- to 5-inch screens.

Let me add that as this blog runs on WordPress, changing a theme typically is a simple process that doesn’t require you to have much knowledge or skill in PHP coding or even HTML. The actual work I had to do to get to what you see now – from installing the new theme on a test blog, testing it, changing some elements, updating some content here, the other changes I mentioned earlier, etc – took me about five hours spread over this weekend.

And finally, if you read this blog’s content in an RSS reader, in your email program or via a syndicated service, you may not notice the design at all never mind a change in it if all you see is the text. That’s great! But, if you have five minutes to spare, do pop in and have a look around.

If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d welcome your feedback, thanks.