My Awesome Blog

What happened with the BloggingTips.com redesign?

Two weeks ago I had the chance to attend FOWD which was awesome and mentioned that I lost out on one of my freelance gigs. That gig was BloggingTips.com

Back in February, I offered Kevin from bloggingtips.com my services to redesign his blog for free. The idea was to get some fresh work into my portfolio, learn how to work under client limitations and objectives, and ultimately to promote my services. Now I could have easily charged him my normal rates ($700+) since I’m not an amateur, but sometimes you do crazy things when your passion driven. Throughout the project’s life span, I made a few mistakes that persuade Kevin to call it quits:

Deadlines:

Everything started out great. Communication was totally there. He gave my design great constructive criticism along with some feedback and ideas, I listened and made changes accordingly. He bounced a few ideas to me, and vice versa. After about 7 or so revisions, we had “the” layout we wanted.

It took me about a good two weeks to finish the mockup from the start date. A day or two later, I had the mockup sliced into xHTML/CSS ready to get converted into WordPress. Originally, I gave him a completion date for a month. I took into account how long the entire theme would take compared to previous work, giving some leeway time for bugs/milestones and days that I go to school/work etc. I forgot one thing, and that was all the events that took place around that time. I wasn’t sure if I could go to any of them so I didn’t add those days in. But I was determined to go to all three of them and since the gig was free, I thought everything was all handy dandy right? Strike one.

Professionalism:

I had everything down pack with my professionalism. I treated him like a paying client or anyone else that I’m doing work for. BUT, when the time came around and I had the chance to attend those events, I didn’t give Kevin an update letting him know that things would take a little longer than expected. The layout still wasn’t converted yet and I over promised several times saying that it’ll be done tonight, or next week. 3-4 weeks into the project I pulled a couple all nighters trying to catch up to get things back on track but something always came up last minute. I shouldn’t have let it go this far. Strike two.

Don’t even treat free gigs like your personal projects:

Ah, another thing I messed up on which probably put the icing on the cake. Its been two weeks after the deadline and I’m coding away, converting everything into WordPress. Things were going perfect despite a few milestones that popped up here and there. One of those I thought I could accomplish but turned into a complete nightmare. It was the last task to do—the section, “browse by author.” This section basically shows a picture of each author along with their name, website, and latest blog post. I figured that would be easy to code, just create a loop for each author and only show 1 post right?

For some reason I couldn’t figure it out and started getting frustrated. Sipping on some kool-aid around 2am on a Saturday night (I think), I was determined to make this section work by trial and error. I tried a million ways trying to make this code pull the latest post by author and broke it down to pieces:

<?php if (have_posts()) : $author = 0; ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); $author ++; ?>

Now we're inside the loop, let's find Rob Mead and see if it works.
<?php if (the_author() == "Rob Mead" ) : ?>

<?php echo "yes!"; else : echo "no"; ?>

<?php endif; endwhile; endif; ?>

Using the awesome Theme Test Drive plugin, I was able to test this on the live blog without any readers seeing it. The script failed displaying “no” so I modified the loop again to see if that would work—still displaying “no.”

I started getting mad at the code, tired of seeing the same word “no” every time I uploaded the changes and refreshed the page so I changed the wording to echo "gay"; so I could see something different. Uploaded and refreshed the page and saw “gay” and had a little laugh. It cooled me down and somehow spark a little energy to start from scratch.

BTW: I say the word “gay” sometimes when things are messed up or when something’s not cool or whatever. To Kevin, well he thought otherwise, (which I can understand) and the way it was being displayed, it read: “Rob Meadgay.” That didn’t help at all. I’m assuming he thought I used the word gay in the gender sense which wasn’t my intention at all. Strike three, you’re out!

I gave up that night and went to bed. The Tuesday before FOWD, I found a solution and was able to fix the problem. I tried to upload the changes but I was removed access from bloggingtips’ FTP. I saw Kevin online and he said:

“It’s been more than 6 weeks since you took on this project and in the last week 2 deadlines you have gave me have been missed. I don’t like doing business like this. It’s become a real hassle and has wasted a lot of my time.”

After chatting over an hour about the issue, I found out that there were some communication problems which could have been easily avoided. Kevin thought I was a full-time web designer:

“ptah - I didnt even know you went to school - I assumed you were a full designer”

“I thought you were self employed via the web which is why I was so baffled at you taking so long for everything.”

On my about page which has been up since this blog started, I clearly stated that I’m a student and that I have a job. I do freelancing part-time.

So I made a few mistakes and learned my lesson. There are no hard feelings between Kevin and I, we parted on good terms. Kevin plans on getting a web design company to redesign his blog in hopes to get a better service. He said the new design would be up on 21st and maybe an extra day or so to make sure everything’s ok. Well, it’s the 28th and I still see the old design… the redesign I made for bloggingtips could have been easily up running already… I have nothing to say.

Now that school’s about done and I don’t plan on attending anymore conferences anytime soon, I’ll have plenty of time to work on those mistakes so that won’t ever happen again. Looking back, I would have given him a nice discount for my troubles like I do with for all my other clients (if something ever happens like this) but the gig was already free!

In the end, I’m lefted with an awesome looking theme that has no home. I’ll be cleaning it up for a public release and release it under the GPL license as my first public theme. It’ll be ready by next week, I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

BloggingTips.com Redesign - Part 2

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.

BloggingTips.com Logo

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:
Multi-Authored Blogs

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.

Don’t want to miss an article in this series? Subscribe to ptahdunbar.com to be one of the first to get the latest insights on News, Case Studies, Web Trends, and more from Ptah Dunbar!

BloggingTips.com - Take your blog to the next level

In this series, I’ll walk you through the process I take on redesigning a popular multi-authored blog, BloggingTips.com.

UPDATE: Part 2 is live: BloggingTips.com Redesign - Part 2

Blogging Tips is the first of many websites to receive a special redesign-on the house. With over 650 articles written from multiple authors ranging from topics like how to promote your blog to making money online, blogging tips has truly provided a wealth load of content that can take your blog to the next level! First, were going to see if blogging tips actually needs a redesign and why.

Does Blogging Tips need a redesign?

When Kevin started bloggingtips.com back in March 2007, he was the only author writing for the blog. Two months later, Kevin welcomed his first guest writer, Mani Karthink from Daily SEO Blog to join the team. Fast forward to the present, Kevin now has a total of 16 blogging tip authors writing on a variety of blogging topics. These guys were constantly producing quality content day after day after day, out growing their current wordpress theme.

If you look at this recent screenshot, you’ll see what I’m talking about:
Old BloggingTips.com

There is a ton of information in the main content area, sidebar, and footer with little visual separation.

New readers visiting Blogging Tips would simply become overwhelmed by the amount of content displayed to them.

How can I change this? Do you think the content can be displayed to the reader in a more visually pleasing way? How do you attract more bloggers to post gigs or request in the Blogging Tips Marketplace? How do you encourage readers to submit links to the Blogging Tips Directory? What could I possible do to make Blogging Tips the best place to go for reading practical tips on blogging from a diverse set of authors?

In the next article throughout this series, I’ll go over the goal of this project and ways to tackle the redesign to better promote the authors.

Don’t want to miss an article in this series? Subscribe to ptahdunbar.com to be one of the first to get the latest insights on News, Case Studies, Web Trends, and more from Ptah Dunbar!