[trienthusiast]

Hello all,

I am running a website for 2 years now. Started as a blog that features mainly reviews, I expanded the content to "other topics for the same users".

I have between 70-100k visitors a month and I want to grow

I am thinking of a redesign and I am for two things:

1) organize my content better: now all content has the same weight on the homepage but I want to give the reviews better visibility and organization (that's what we do best) and leave the side content there, but not make it "king"

2) achieve a more professional look. I think I have a good looking blog, but it's still a blog - some identity but not much different than 1,000,000 other blogs out there


So here are my questions:

- Can I risk losing traffic? (mainly organic through SEO)
- Will consumers trust me MORE or LESS if I redesign more "professional"? what i mean is... now I look like a guy with a blog that makes detailed reviews of a product he knows well. I convert ok. If I change the look and make it look like it's a professional website, will consumers lose some of the trust they have or actually be more reassured by a more professional look?
- what do you think of services like 99designs and designcrowd?

Any first hand experience with this?

thank you

[teezone]

This is tough one.. having been through redesigns myself, you never really know what the outcome will be...

You have to look at your current layout - what is effective & ineffective about it..? How are the click-throughs..? What are the most popular pages.. both internally, and from the search engines. You want to protect the high-converting pages. The rest you can play around with...

If you're using one of the popular CMS apps (Wordpress, for example), you can always do a soft launch of a new template, which will allow you iron out the bugs. I did this myself a couple of months ago, and it worked out quite well.

If the main content of the site is your own commentary, I would want to keep a homegrown "vibe" in place - I agree that something TOO slick and professional could give the site a more impersonal feel. You can also rearrange sidebars & content without a redesign.. I would definitely experiment with placement.

I'm not sure I've helped. There is no right or wrong answer, but I have found "spring cleaning" a site usually does provide some benefits. I'm unfamiliar with the services you mentioned, as I do my own website work (with the exception of logos), but someone else may have some experience with them.

[Chuck Hamrick]

Let me know if you want a review of the actual site and I can move this conversation here: http://www.abestweb.com/forums/site-...er-review-146/

[CoolMaster]

Hi trienthusiast,

I really do hope that you find a way to solve your issue, it is a hard one to address.

I personally think that in the long run it would be beneficial to redesign your site to go along with the expansion and i don't think you readers will mind since it's the content that brought them in the first time.

The hardest thing is the change of identity, from a blogger to a more sophisticated site owner you can not predict the crowds reaction.

I would get my site reviewed and get the best design ideas for the situation.

Hope you the best,

CoolMaster

[CFW]

Originally Posted by trienthusiast

now I look like a guy with a blog that makes detailed reviews of a product he knows well.

Isn't that what you want?

The question is if a site redesign would bring you more money. It probably won't get you more visitors, but it might get you a higher conversion rate. You need to decide if it's a better use of time to go for more people, or a higher conversion rate.

You say you have 70-100k people/month. How many months have you had those visitor numbers? Are you not able to grow through marketing any more?

You could try A/B testing. Google website optimizer allows this. I've never used this tool myself, but it might help.

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

Hope this helps. Good luck!

[trienthusiast]

thanks everybody for the replies.

I had some time to think about this and I think that I wanted the website to look more professional more for "ego" reasons rather than for business reason.

I still think I want to redesign, but it needs to be with my reader in mind. So, i want to keep a "homemade" feel but with great legibility and possibly some more brand identity and easier navigation to and from the pages I want.

this thinking about design actually gave me a great opportunity to think about my content in general and where to focus my efforts, also marketing efforts.

now - another question for you. what are review sites you really like ? on a SEO point of view... if i make the review in a tabbed format (editor review, user reviews, image gallery, specs, price comparison) will every tab be a different html page (for bots crawling/indexing?) or will only the first tab be picked up?

AND can you suggest a good designer? I am looking through hundreds of websites and portfolios but I trust you abestwebber best... i am not so convinced going the crowdsourcing route but am open to suggestions.

thanks again!

[CFW]

Glad we could be of help.

Unfortunately, I don't use review sites much (I've heard too many stories about fake reviews and they always seem to be so busy & not have many reviews).

Never worked with outsourced designers, sorry.