Blog interview: NorthxEast.com design strategy

Posted on March 28, 2007
Filed Under themes, interviews |

This is the first in a series of WordPress case studies talking to bloggers old at new about a key aspect of their blog from a technical, design or even ethical viewpoint. All featured bloggers will have be using WordPress, and will pass on real world advice, pointers and experiences which should be of interest.

My first subject is Collis of http://northxeast.com. NorthxEast is “all about startups” and follows Collis as he puts together his upcoming book. A lot of thought has obviously gone into the planning of upcoming content on this blog.

I first spotted northxeast about 3 days before a significant template change. I was impressed by a good batch of varied, interesting articles with some personality. The design change really lifted the content, so I was interested to know a little about the design process around that change.

I started by asking Collis how high a priority the design of his blog was when planning his blogging activities:

It was pretty high, being from a design background I have a tendency of thinking design is everything and I actually produced a design 2 months prior to building the site then decided I hated it. I wasted a month thinking I was going to get around to designing a new scheme before launch, then i realised that I may as well just go for it and use some elses theme to get started. This was the best thing I ever did.

nxe_old.gif

This is the previous design of the blog, you can see the clear connection with the current theme, especially the logo in the masthead. This rolled over from the previous design below. You can see how quickly Collis must have taken the design below to produce the launch design. Simply grab the header logo, save on a white background, and flip the standard template header. This, for me, is the beauty of the sheer breadth of available wordpress themes out there.

nxe_unused.gif

So how did the new design come about?

A month later I found the time to do this design. In the end this was a better way to go about things as I now understood what was important in my blog design - things I hadn’t considered prior to starting the site (like ads, RSS Subscription icons etc)

nxe_current.gif

Visit the site by clicking the pic above to see the design in action. Another interesting approach Collis took related to the way he moved to the full current design, he outsourced the move from photoshop to template using PSD2HTML.

So how did he find this process?

I was pleased with these guys, I’ve used them three times now, they aren’t the cheapest out there and they aren’t as fast as some other claim to be, but they deliver exactly what they say and for me thats what is important. Their turn around was 5 days, they HTMLised the site and then I tweaked some styles until I was happy. What was good about them was that they did a few things which I had forgot to tell them (like making extra buttons, setting up my top posts section and so on).

So how much work was still to be done once the files arrived from PSD2HTML?

With the amount of style tweaking I did, it probably was about two hours worth, and that was simply because it is one thing to see a design in Photoshop and its another to see it actually live with real data, you inevitably see discrepancies and things that you realise with hindsight weren’t great choices after all.

I’ll be trying out a PSD2HTML like service myself shortly, and am greatly encouraged by this report. I’ve often had my doubts that the attention to detail would be there with services provided at such arms length. I’ll post details of the before and after once my project gets underway. The results on northxeast speak for themselves.

Many thanks to Collis for his helpful and willing input on the interview. Do check out some of his content, it can be an interesting mix of startup, seo, and general blogging news. You’ll also find me commenting there from time to time.

If you have any suggestions for future interviews drop me an email at steve@wordpressguy.com or add a comment below.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Blog interview: NorthxEast.com design strategy”

  1. collis on March 28th, 2007 4:47 pm

    Thanks Steve,

    In case anyone is interested the white design is a modified version of the WordPress theme “Blogtxt” - http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/blogtxt/ which i added my own logo to… Lovely, simple theme

  2. The Paper Bull on March 29th, 2007 3:47 am

    You picked a good author to interview. Collis’ site is top notch.

    I’m the midst of a site overhaul as well and hope to have it live within a couple weeks (if I can finally nail down which direction to take)

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