Some Small Design Changes

As you should’ve already noticed, Subzero Blue has undergone some small design changes, the most important of which is the switch to a 1024×768 screen resolution.

I’ve been working on these design changes for a couple of months now, mainly getting used to them myself, trying to work out the best way to use space and organize the different elements of the blog.

There’s still some work to do here and there, but well I thought I’d just go ahead and put up these changes anyway, and then continue tweaking.

Other than the small changes in the design that I will let you discover for yourselves, I have also made the summaries feed a full post feed too. I think a person subscribing to a blog’s feed should be respected just as much as a person who visits the blog itself, if not more.

You’ll also notice some ads scattered here and there, not all of these will stay, some are just for tests, others are temporary placeholders.

I showed the design to a few people over the past month or so to get their feedback, and the reviews were mixed (some loved it, some didn’t like it), so in the end I went with my own instinct about it and put it online.
What do you think?

Published by

Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.

14 thoughts on “Some Small Design Changes”

  2. I like it 🙂 The funny thing is that I was working on a very similar 3 columns template for a while now, never finished though!

    Maybe you should try larger font size for main posts. Small font are so has been 😉 hehe

    Monthly archive list in the sidebar is ugly and useless in my opinion. A tag cloud could be more usable.

  3. I find the 2 columns template way prettier.
    The page looks more crowded now and the the third column is basically for ads. From my own experience, It is better to keep the number of adsense units to a minimum. Simple explanation: If you give the visitor more choices you won’t garantee he will click the highest paying ad. I usually put just one ad unit and this not only gives me more space in my page it also improves my earnings. The square, rectangular units give by far higher CTRs, so If I were you I would start by removing that skyscraper. You can also improve your CTR by putting small images next to your ads. Images next to ads are border line under adsense TOS but you should be fine putting random images. Amazon listings can be arranged in the second column. If am not sure those referrals are worth all that space. Finally the search form can be put in the second column as well.
    I like the idea of a tag cloud but I would keep the archives as well, they serve as a sitemap for the crawlers and provides valuable links to the posts from the homepage.

  4. Tarek, for search engine’s sake, the monthly archive list is better could be visible in a separate Archives page (see my blog).

    About the crowded look, I guess some font, line spacing, and side blocks tweaking would give a better feel.

    One very important thing, as I experienced in my blog, is using tags as internal links instead of technorati ones. Such practice it could double the number of visitors : for obvious reason, Google loves keyword rich tag pages with dynamic titles 🙂 In my blog, tag pages are more popular than individual articles.

  5. Thanks for the tip hussein concerning tags pointing to internal pages. I already did that in tuniblogs and I see no point in linking to technorati (you’re giving away free links and free traffic). Goog loves content rich pages and those pages are perfectly optimized (keyword or tag in url, in title, description,… also has a backlink with an anchor text matching exactly the targetted keyword, plus the body contains a good density of the keyword. However this can be considered as spamming by google since you are able to generate as many pages as you wish with the same redundant content. Especially if you do like me and generate the tags cloud automatically from the posts.

  6. hmmm I don’t think they consider it as spamming… It could be used as such, but as long as you don’t abuse, it is ok I guess 🙂

  7. By the way, the tag cloud in tuniblogs is a feature from FoF reloaded right? You didn’t implement it, did you?

    Oh, and I like what you did with tuniblogs 😉 We should meet some time, are you in Montreal ?

  9. For the tag cloud I used a script that builds a string from the content, source of cloud, which can be the items content, the items titles or if available the feeds tags. I used the titles because they are more or less descriptive of the items. After building the string, the script explodes it, counts the frequency of each word, eliminates the short and common words and then assigns a font size for every word depending on its frequency.
    the tag cloud generated will contains only words, not groups of words. For example you want have a tag like “tag cloud” you will have “tag” and “cloud” instead. I think this is the only way to do it unless the string in built from the feeds tags which I could not retrieve from the # format feeds.
    Yes I am in Montreal, I go to mcgill and I stay close to it, let’s have a coffee sometime 🙂

  10. 1 last thing, after generating the cloud, I just add a href to “?search=tag”. that’s it.
    If you need the script let me know

  11. Thanks for the explanation Tarek, very smart 😉

    I wasn’t able to find your email. Could you please send me a message: houssein * gmail.com

    Thanks

  13. Thanks guys for your ideas and thoughts about this design, I’ll be taking it all into consideration as I go on tweaking and playing around with the design.

    And Tarek, it’s ok about hijacking the post, I’m happy it was a reason for you guys to meet.
    Hopefully one day we’ll all meet somewhere too 😉

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