Blogging 101: Re-Designing your Blog

Before I went on my on and off again hiatus I had a lot of high hopes for the blog, and this meant completely re-designing it to improve the overall look. I’d had my previous look for a few years, and it was starting to feel a bit old and worn out, and I wasn’t really sure what I could do with it. 

Re-branding and re-designing can be complicated (especially when you have accounts on multiple platforms!). So when I decided that a re-design was on the cards I made a checklist of what I wanted to change. These things were fairly similar to what to think when first designing and branding.  

This checklist is a bit of a long-term plan for me, as some of the actions take longer. However the main bulk of my re-design and re-brand has happened now, and I’m pretty happy with it. Whilst my checklist is my checklist you can definitely use it as a starting point for your own. 

Checklist:

• Logo/banner re-design
• Find/create new theme
• Colour scheme
• New fonts
• Featured image design
• Pinterest image design
• Front page layout
• TBG off-shoot brand

Clear goal for Re-Designing

A key thing before re-branding or re-designing is having a clear goal for why you want to. If you’re doing it just ‘because you can’ it may not work as well as it could. Your goal can be as simple as you want your site to look better (like me). Or you can have bigger goals like you want to create a good space for ads, or to make it more official looking for brand deals for monetisation. Or you want to go self-hosted and have a full re-design on top of that to show your growth in all areas. Another reason for my re-design was that I also started TBG, where I wanted both UO and TBG to have similar branding.

But knowing this goal can help. So for me, I wanted to work on making it look better – so the focus was on finding different layouts, fonts, and colour schemes which I may want to work with. I spent a lot of time just thinking about different elements of my homepage and posts. Plus, how each of these fit with one another. I debated paying for a custom theme, or just choosing one that gets it pretty close (as I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on it). 

For a monetisation goal, it’s important to know exactly what you need. Some people don’t use side bars anymore, but a lot of ad space is in the sidebar, so you know you should probably keep that. For brand deals, companies like their product being shown off, so featured images that make their products look good is best. 

These are just a couple of examples, but just figure out your goal for this change, and make a list of requirements you need from your blog to best meet that goal. 

Using Widgets and Plugins Before Committing

Before I went full re-design, I tested some different looks using the theme I already had and using widgets. Find out different layouts you can create on your blog, and test which one you think your readers will prefer. Remember, your blog should cater to those who read it! (You could also try Twitter polls to ask questions about design choices). 

Different plugins can help change up the look of your blog too without spending money on it. For example, the Instagram social slider bar at the bottom of the page… this has an added visual appeal for my blog whilst promoting Insta. 

Homepage and theme

So you’ve changed up the layout a bit, you know what you need, and now you need to think of what theme you want for your homepage. I’ve always found looking at loads of themes can be overwhelming, but it can also give you a good idea of what you could do with your own blog. 

Alternatively, you could create a design of what you want your homepage to look like first, and then find a theme that fits that as closely as possible. You can also pay to get custom built themes created for you, or if you’re a code wizard yourself you can learn to make your own theme! I went down the route of finding a similar theme, due to me not having enough money or coding skills – however I edited the code a bit to ensure I had the right fonts I wanted, and the correct sizing of certain aspects (Like my front page slider). 

Here are some theme designers that you can purchase pre-built themes from:

• Volthemes
• Sky and Stars
• Angie Makes
• Kotryna Bass
• Blog Pixie
• Love Riot
• 17th Avenue
• Sweet Horizon
• Hello You

Logo and branding on socials

On top of re-designing your actual site – if you’re changing up things like logos or even site name, then you need to go through the process on all platforms. If you’re anything like me with a FOMO of social platforms… this can be a lot. 

So to make it a bit easier – make sure you’ve created your logo and header with the minimum sizes below for each platform. 

Facebook

• Profile picture – 180×180 pixels (For both personal and business pages)
• Cover photo – 820×312 pixels
• Feed shared image – 1200×630 pixels
• Link shared image – 1200×628 pixels
• Event image – 1920×1080 pixels
  

Twitter

• Profile photo – 400×400 pixels
• Header image – 1500×500 pixels
• Feed image – 440×220 pixels (2:1 ratio)
  

Instagram

• Profile picture – 110×110 pixels
• Photo size (square) – 1080×1080 pixels
• Photo size (portrait rectangular) – 1080×1350 pixels
• Photo size (landscape rectangular) – 1350×1080 pixels
• Instagram stories – 1080×1920 pixels
  

Pinterest

• Profile picture – 165×165 pixels
• Pin size – 600 pixel width (height is scaled; Ratio 2:3 to 1:3.5)
• Board display image – 222×150 pixels

YouTube

• Profile picture – 800×800 pixels
• Channel cover photo – 2560×1440 pixels
• Video thumbnails – 1280 x 720 pixels

LinkedIn

• Profile image – 400×400 pixels
• Background image – 1584×396 pixels
• Company logo – 300×300 pixels
• Company cover image – 1536×768 pixels
• Banner image (company) – 646×220 pixels
• Shared image – 1104×736 pixels