Akkam’s Razor

Radicalized on the internets since 1996.

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Time for a Redesign

April 26th, 2007 · 3 Comments

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:

  1. Decrease load times.
    1. Cache as much content (and plugins) as possible.
    2. Go to coded-HTML where possible versus PHP/MySQL.
    3. Change mix of widgets based on page type, to decrease MySQL calls.
    4. Employ Throttle and/or external caching services.
  2. Increase Stickiness (left sidebar, on individual posts).
    1. Better category use (displayed as tags).
      1. Cut back to 5 +/ -2 Categories, all others are subcategories.
    2. Display widgetized (internal and external) content.
      1. Header
        1. Title
        2. Tagline
        3. Pages
        4. Search
      2. Left-sidebar (Context and Content).
        1. Tags
        2. Related Internal Content
        3. Popular Content
        4. Related External Content
        5. Latest Content
        6. Recent Comments
        7. Recent Referrers
        8. Recent Trackbacks
      3. Right-Side (Presence and Branding).
        1. Quotes.
        2. Online Networking.
        3. Prerquisite "Blog Flare".
        4. Notable Content
        5. Flickr Photos
        6. Digg News
        7. Blogroll
        8. Meta (hide?  only on toolbar?)
      4. Footer
        1. Ownership.
        2. Technology and "Shoutbacks".
        3. Counter Information.
        4. Syndication
        5. Creative Commons License.
    3. Facilitate linking, comments, and bookmarking.
      1. Easy URLS.
      2. Clear and robust comment process and policy.
      3. Write friendly and easily bookmarkable "ledes" (does del.icio.us pull them from pages?)
    4. Better writing.
      1. Ledes.
      2. Footnotes.
      3. External Link Tables.
      4. Fewer Posts.
    5. Thematic Content.
      1. Start doing relavent posts based on current events.
      2. Lifeblogging.
      3. Academic blogging.
        1. Psychology
        2. Marketing
        3. Management
        4. Consumer Behavior
        5. Indistrial Psychology
        6. Organizational Dynamics
      4. Hobby and Interest Blogging
        1. Automobiles
        2. Daily Links
        3. Politics
        4. Popculture
        5. Technology
        6. Webculture
    6. Sitemaps (problematic due to cache issues).
    7. Tags (manual or automatic?)
  3. Create Revenue (various)
    1. Follow SEO best practices (titles, metatags, site-name, etc).
    2. Display discreet (but relavent) advertising.
    3. Advertising should be a mix of text ads, image ads, link ads, and banner ads.
    4. Use a variety of providers and implementations.
    5. 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.
  4. Increase Branding and Presence (various for style, right sidebar for content).
    1. Consistent Visual Appearance and Style.
      1. Unique Color Scheme
      2. Logo and Icon?
      3. New favicon?
      4. Decide "what my site means".
    2. Repitition of Themes (aesthtics).
    3. Use of In-Series Content.
    4. Increased use of tags and thematic content.
  5. Integrate internal and external content.
    1. My own content sources (digg, akkamsrazor, del.icio.us).
    2. External content (Google Blogsearch, Flickr, digg, newsvine, del.icio.us).
  6. Outcomes
    1. Deliver metric (and monetary) improvements.
    2. Influence Webculture
      1. Examine the Current Culture
      2. Formulate the Ideal Culture
      3. Assign meaning to the difference
      4. Prioritize outcomes
      5. Design an Implementation.
      6. Measure the Results.
      7. Share the Results Transparently.

Redesign Notes for Akkam’s Razor

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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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