In this series, I’m going through the process of redesigning a very popular multi-authored blog, BloggingTips.com. Blogging Tips is the first of many websites to receive a special redesign-on me. Part 1 talks about whether blogging tips actually needs a redesign. I raised a lot of unanswered questions regarding how I could go about executing the redesign.

In this article, I’ll go over the goal for this redesign and have it serve as my guideline if more questions arise or if I get lost throughout the whole process, which ever comes first!:)

Goal

The goal for the redesign of BloggingTips.com is to design and develop a WordPress theme that will give readers a chance to read articles about blogging from multiple authors in an elegant fashion. This WordPress theme needs to be fast loading and really highlight on the authors who produce the content.

Designing the Mock-ups

Doing a redesign for a multi-authored blog that brings in around 30,000 unique page views a month (according to compete) isn’t a quick walk in the park. This isn’t a new blog that’s about to start soon with little to no reader base. Blogging Tips has been online for since last year March. I had to keep in mind the fact that they have readers who already are accustomed to browsing Blogging Tips in its current format. With that said, I couldn’t redesign the blog anyway I want so I’ll try to make improvements and adjustments and only if necessary, create something entirely new.

Brainstorming ideas

Not completely knowing what was in a multi-authored blog, I thought about looking at how other multi-authored blogs are approaching this:

These are the typical layout structures for multi-authored blogs, especially ReadWriteWeb. They’re not bad, the huffintonpost and Small Business Branding are the only two that comes close to what I’m looking for. It seems like a lot of multi-authored blogs don’t really focus of the authors a lot do they? Maybe they’re in-house writers, or paid differently. Whatever the case may be, one of my primary goals are to highlight on the authors, so let’s continue.

Things to Do

When I approached Kevin with a proposal to redesign his site, I thought about a few enhancements that could benefit his blog. Here’s a list of what I plan on doing for the new BloggingTips.com:

• A fresh new look with a more professional feel
• Multiple layout views for the content on BloggingTips. (think news/magazine style themes, but different)
• Decluttering the sidebar!
• Restructuring the Author Pages to better promote their work
• Making BloggingTips standards complaint on modern browsers
• Reformatting the content area for more visual clues
• And a lot more minor adjustments and visual enhancements…

In the next article throughout this series, it’s time to get down to the real work and start designing some actual mock-ups! I’ll show you the mock-ups I presented Kevin and the changes made all the way to the final version. It’s a smooth transition I might add.

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