I'm reasonably sure that I've been using this design since ~2004, when I moved from Blogger to Wordpress. So, it's high-time I redesigned.
To sketch out what I'm hoping to do, I have the following goals:
- Decrease load times.
- Cache as much content (and plugins) as possible.
- Go to coded-HTML where possible versus PHP/MySQL.
- Change mix of widgets based on page type, to decrease MySQL calls.
- Employ Throttle and/or external caching services.
- Increase Stickiness (left sidebar, on individual posts).
- Better category use (displayed as tags).
- Cut back to 5 +/ -2 Categories, all others are subcategories.
- Display widgetized (internal and external) content.
- Header
- Title
- Tagline
- Pages
- Search
- Left-sidebar (Context and Content).
- Tags
- Related Internal Content
- Popular Content
- Related External Content
- Latest Content
- Recent Comments
- Recent Referrers
- Recent Trackbacks
- Right-Side (Presence and Branding).
- Quotes.
- Online Networking.
- Prerquisite "Blog Flare".
- Notable Content
- Flickr Photos
- Digg News
- Blogroll
- Meta (hide? only on toolbar?)
- Footer
- Ownership.
- Technology and "Shoutbacks".
- Counter Information.
- Syndication
- Creative Commons License.
- Facilitate linking, comments, and bookmarking.
- Easy URLS.
- Clear and robust comment process and policy.
- Write friendly and easily bookmarkable "ledes" (does del.icio.us pull them from pages?)
- Better writing.
- Ledes.
- Footnotes.
- External Link Tables.
- Fewer Posts.
- Thematic Content.
- Start doing relavent posts based on current events.
- Lifeblogging.
- Academic blogging.
- Psychology
- Marketing
- Management
- Consumer Behavior
- Indistrial Psychology
- Organizational Dynamics
- Hobby and Interest Blogging
- Automobiles
- Daily Links
- Politics
- Popculture
- Technology
- Webculture
- Sitemaps (problematic due to cache issues).
- Tags (manual or automatic?)
- Create Revenue (various)
- Follow SEO best practices (titles, metatags, site-name, etc).
- Display discreet (but relavent) advertising.
- Advertising should be a mix of text ads, image ads, link ads, and banner ads.
- Use a variety of providers and implementations.
- DO NOT display ads to registered users or users who are visiting from a feed, bookmark, non-search engine referral, or by directly typing in the URL.
- Increase Branding and Presence (various for style, right sidebar for content).
- Consistent Visual Appearance and Style.
- Unique Color Scheme
- Logo and Icon?
- New favicon?
- Decide "what my site means".
- Repitition of Themes (aesthtics).
- Use of In-Series Content.
- Increased use of tags and thematic content.
- Integrate internal and external content.
- My own content sources (digg, akkamsrazor, del.icio.us).
- External content (Google Blogsearch, Flickr, digg, newsvine, del.icio.us).
- Outcomes
- Deliver metric (and monetary) improvements.
- Influence Webculture
- Examine the Current Culture
- Formulate the Ideal Culture
- Assign meaning to the difference
- Prioritize outcomes
- Design an Implementation.
- Measure the Results.
- Share the Results Transparently.
Redesign Notes for Akkam’s Razor
Popularity: 43% [?]
3 responses so far ↓
1 Phillybits // Apr 26, 2007 at 12:44 pm
For starters, it seems like you’ve got quite the plan drawn up there. I wish you luck and as someone who’s done a number of site appearance re-designs simply and relatively on the fly, I know it can be time-consuming, frustrating, and wrought with technical errors and kinks that need to be worked out along the way.
Speaking soley on widgets, I’m sure Wordpess includes a calendar plug-in but I just found one yesterday that looked pretty interesting. From what I read, it works for Wordpress as well, is highly customizable, and if done right, is neat, looks attractive, and could serve as a useful tool.
Some screenshots I took.
The site itself.
2 rzklkng // Apr 28, 2007 at 10:24 am
I’m not really looking to make revolutionary changes - just evolutionary ones. To be honest, I blog for no one other than myself - if other people enjoy it, good for them. The problem I’m having is my own low level of specific (coding skill), the desire for feature-bloat (by including everything humanly possible) and the less than stellar performance of my (very) inexpensive host (1and1).
3 rzklkng // Apr 28, 2007 at 10:25 am
Also, this post will be a proof of concept for the “series” posts, where I’ll document my thoughts and progress as I go along. My thought is that by thinking these things through and creating a record (and measuring results), I might actually learn something.
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