I’m happy to report that I just launched a redesign of my personal blog and namesite, TedCarnahan.com. It’s still got some rough edges, and I’ve got some cleaning up to do, but I’m really happy with the overall look and feel of it. It took about 12 hours of work (mostly nights when the family was asleep) to put it together over the past week or ten days.
Lessons Learned
There is room for categories and tags on a blog. About a year ago, I was struggling with the role of categories on the site, and I decided to abandon categories in favor of tags only. It took me quite a while to go through and re-categorize all those hundreds of old articles.
Microblogging belongs on microblogs. I tried to use a category for “Asides” to format small, microblog-worthy tidbits for easier consumption. Turns out I didn’t use it very often, and most of my posting of links happens on Twitter and Facebook.
Better to launch early than not at all. It was hard launching this one when I did, but if I didn’t, I’d spend a month tweaking and tweaking until it was “perfect.” Then I’d probably find a flaw after launching it anyway.
Disqus is a great platform for comments. The WordPress plugin for Disqus makes it really easy to connect to this comment system, and it gives your visitors the ability to use their Twitter or Facebook accounts to log in and comment on your site. I wish I’d known about it sooner.
Questions? Comments on the new design? I’d love to hear from you below.
Love the drop down header
Thanks, Blaise. I wanted to get away from having the standard blog sidebar, and I was also tired of the Big Fat Blog Footer. Who knows – maybe I'll start a trend?