The redesign is slowly moving live as you read this, the reason it’s not all *poof* at the same time is that I’m currently in San Francisco watching my business partners rock the mics on blog panels. But it’ll continue to go live tonight, and over the next few days and onto next week.
Reasons for Redesign
I really liked the previous BusinessLogs.com design — it was very clean, minimal, and about as “corporate looking” as I could make something look. So why change? Because it didn’t do what we wanted.
We’re not very tight-lipped about our traffic figures around here, so I’ll go right on and say that our website receives 6-9k pageviews per day, with the most traffic going straight to individual entries we’ve posted. That’s a pretty good chunk of people, considering most people who read this weblog are industry figures, tech moguls, standards evangelists, and generally cool, smart people. Unfortunately, many of our readers don’t even know that we’re a consulting firm because we weren’t highlighting our services and projects well. In fact, we probably highlighted our weblog too much, and we felt we needed to stress the business aspect of what we do a bit more.
Main Goals
Since I liked the previous design (and so do many of our readers and clients) my goal when approaching the redesign was to make it cleaner and for it to highlight our work/services more. Here are the main aspects of the redesign:
- Cleaned Up Code — The old source was a bit jagged. Our old image-replaced H1 was almost half-way down the HTML file, and the semantics behind the tags weren’t as solid as they could be. In this version, you’ll see that on the homepage we use
H1
throughH6
in the code, in order. Our newH1
isn’t the logo anymore, it’s a brief overview of what Business Logs actually does with a link to our services page, which is now much better for search engine rankings. If you look through the source you’ll see that it’s a bit tighter in other places as well (less superfluousspan
tags, more paragraphs, etc.) - New Projects Section — The projects section is our portfolio so to speak. I’m still designing the main Projects landing page, but check out the 9rules or TurtleTrader projects for a brief look into what I was trying to do. The cool technical wizardry behind the projects section includes a brand new MovableType weblog powering it, with Categories being used to keep track of services we’ve provided for each project.
- New Footer Area — On the bottom of our new pages you’ll see a new footer area that is a quick overview of who we are and what we do. This goes well with the goal we thought up at the beginning, where we didn’t feel like we were doing a good job telling people who visit our weblog what it is we really do. It’s actually my favorite part of the redesign 🙂
And Finally
This redesign is all about iteration. One of the things we really tried to accomplish with this new design was the flexibility to change the way pages look and feel without a lot of heartache, and that’s something I’m pretty proud of. Things will be moving around the next few days, things will be changing, so please give us your feedback and ideas and we’ll pay close attention.