New Blog Design in Place

Terrific – looks great! Now the design and layout of your blog matches the quality of the content! It’s all easy to find too!

Fraser

A vast improvement on your old design. An extremely clean cut design that I find very easy to distinguish posts, and the different sections in your sidebar. Nice big simple buttons to help navigate that remind me of a phone designed for the elderly )

Little splashes of colour that complement and contrast with each other (if that’s possible). Too often blogs are confusing with so many different widgets and gadgets that all tend to merge into one, yet this design helps alleviate this. Great design by Hussain.

The only disappointment for me, where has your caricature gone?

Liking your new theme, very clean and all that. I really like the bottom part/footer of your blog.

Jamie

Very nice, soon the place to say, can I have a design that is like that one please LOL Cool look, but lets not forget even if it looks like crap the most important thing is the content is top rate and now you have a design to go with it.

As you know Fraser I’m a sucker for a well designed WordPress blog and this one is really great. Congrats to you and your designer. Nice job.

Very pleasant design Fraser. I did notice your caricature had gone, is this going to be replaced with one of Sylar?

Great design Fraser, much easier to distinguish each of the sections now and even easier to access the great content

Thanks for all the comments folks It’s good to know other people like the design too. Hussain has done a great job!

Do drop me a line if you have any suggestions for changes as well or if you notice any errors. (Thanks Tara )

Hey great fresh new design Fraser congratulations.

To be honest, I don’t really remember the old design that well. Really hadn’t been there probably enough times. Must not have been anything bad about it though or then you’d think it would have made a very bad impression on me. lol

I do very much like this design, though.:) It has a very nice, fresh clean design to it. Very nicely organized. Would be nicer if it was the gray color and purple, though. lol Just kidding.:) Looks very nice and Hussain does very nice work

Thanks Matt

Purplebear – well I’m glad it didn’t make a bad impression even if the old design didn’t make any impression at all!

Hi Fraser,

Nice looking blog theme, good work! Very well layed out and easy on the eye.

I would suggest you get your developer to tweak the code to improve SEO. He has tagged up all the sub headers with H2 tags. Which means that on every page you have the following H2 tags.

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Hi Julian – thanks for the feedback.

I think my old theme had all these sorts of headings as H2 as well. Are you suggesting that these would be better not as headings and as something less important?

Yes would are right there is no need to wrap terms like “Sponsors” in a H2 tag. I would remove all of the “standard” h2 and h3 (you have some of those as well) from the theme’s code. Then add them manually to each post. This will allow you have text in the H2 and H3 which is specific to page.

If you imagine each webpage as a book, the title tag is the title of book and the H1 to H6 tags the chapter headings. Google uses them to understand what the page is about. So with standard H2 tags on every page you are not helping google understand what your page is about.

This is your current structure:

Title = New Blog Design in Place – Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Blog
H1 = New Blog Design in Place
H2 = Trackbacks & Pingbacks
H2 = Latest Podcast
h2 = Recent Podcasts
h2 = Sponsors
h2 = Recent posts
h2 = Search
h2 = Recent Readers
h2 = Associates
h2 = About
h2 = Subscribe
h2 = Recent comments
h2 = Must-read posts
h2 =Archives
H3 = Loads of other no page specific links and titles, basically everything in your large footer.

A more optimised page structure would be (if you were targeting “Blog deisgn” for example):

Title = New Blog Design in Place – Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Blog
H1 = New Blog Design in Place
h2 = Blog re-design was overdue
H3 = Needed external help with Blog Design
H4 = What do you think of my new blog design?

Do you see how much easier you would make it for google to understand the topic of the page?

At the end of the day these suggestions will make a slight different, but becuase it not much work to remove all the standard H tags in the template i would recommend it. But there lots of other more important ranking factors, see here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-factors-version-2-released

Any other questions just let me know. Also dont look at my blog structure, it too needs some tweaking. Hehe.

Julian.

I see where you are coming from Julian. I’ll tweak the theme as you suggested soon

Thanks for the time you took to give that advice!

Hi Fraser – The blog looks great with your recently updated theme. I just downloaded Apple’s Safari browser for Windows and noticed that your top menu bar doesn’t render properly. Instead of spanning the width of the box, the menu items (home, podcasts etc) are all on the left and overlapping each other. Not sure if its the same using Safari from a Mac but you might want to check it out.

Thanks for the feedback Rob, that’s really helpful. Any chance you could check it out now as it should be fixed.

Hi Fraser – just trying again with Safari and looks perfect now.

Thanks for checking again Rob Much appreciated!

Nice new design, I really like it ::