I recently had the opportunity to renovate a wonderfully written music blog, redeyegin.com. The blog was started about a year ago and its author was ready to take it to the next level. The main goal of the renovation was to make the blog more functional and to reorganize it to attract new followers.

Previously, the blog had a one-column theme, with important social media links located in the footer.

Functional changes included:

• Adopting a 2-column theme – This allowed a large-scale reorganization of the content. Social media links, which are critical to increasing the number of blog followers, were added to the sidebar as well as retained in the footer.
• Showcasing content – Previously, visitors could only see the most recent blog post at the top of the site. Adopting a new theme allows visitors to see more content, such as the list of recent posts in the sidebar, when they first land on the site.
• Implementing responsive design – The blog’s theme was not optimized for viewing on smaller screens, like tablets and phones. We selected a responsive theme that provides excellent readability on these devices.
• Custom HTML and CSS – We added a suggestion box page, connected to a sidebar widget, to facilitate additional communication between visitors and the author.
• Improving page loading time – The blog includes many large video files, which are essential content. Removing them is not an option. We did however reduce the number of these on the main page, while keeping this content easily accessible to visitors. This improved page loading times by 50%. Additional improvements were achieved by reformatting some of the larger images on the site.
• Content editing – We moved some of the footer content into a new “About” page. This lightened the footer, and put this content where visitors can easily find it.
• Categorizing – The blog covers a diverse range of topics. We suggested that the author categorize his posts, and then include a list of categories on the sidebar to showcase his content.

Visually, the site looked good, but there were a few details that we updated:

• Adjusting the banner image’s color levels so the blog’s title was more readable
• Using custom CSS to change some of the details of the styling and color scheme
• Removing unused social media links to add more whitespace around blog comments

Overall, a very successful renovation. redeyegin.com has great content, and now it also has a functional and attractive interface.

Interested in seeing the final result? 

Read redeyegin’s post about the site’s renovation and explore their new website.

Or, contact us for a consultation about your project