Category: GeneralOkDork v3: It's Live
If you’re reading this post from your favorite RSS reader then now would be a good time to click through and look at Noah’s new blog design. After about a week and a half of working on the design we decided to launch it today, just in time for the May 1st reboots – there are too many of those to list anymore.
I decided to redesign Noah’s site because there were a lot of problems with his other design. When I designed it I was in a rush and didn’t really focus on details when it was coded. With this design I told myself I would focus on details, make sure everything worked, and finish the design. Not everything works yet, but it will.
The main things Noah wanted to do were highlight the fact that anyone can join, write, and get free links back to their blog. He wanted to encourage people to comment, interact, and he wanted to increase his page views (stats whore).
Increase interactivity
This is something that a lot of people want on their blogs. They want to interact with their readers. Here’s the thing: readers don’t want to interact with you unless you write good content. If you write good content, you’ll get interaction – you could practically hide the fact that you allow comments and you’d still get them.
Noah gets comments now, so I didn’t have to try too hard to promote people commenting. If you comment a lot you get listed on his “Top Commenters” list they gets reset every month. If you register and post you get free posts on a popular blog.
The point is that I didn’t do anything too fancy to promote interactivity. All the Ajax in all the world won’t get people to comment if your content sucks.
Increase Noah’s pageviews
Noah told me that he gets a fuzzy feeling when he sees his pageviews skyrocket. I did my best to make Noah’s fuzzy feeling stick around by giving people as many chances as possible to click through to new articles.
The new archives page (which isn’t done yet) will be a great way for people to figure out which posts they want to read. The related articles at the bottom of each post will help people find content they’re interested in if they like articles. The authors list will help people find more posts by their favorite authors.
It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a good start. It is much easier to find new posts than it was with Noah’s last layout.
Details
I tried to give some more attention to details. A lot of it you might not notice but the point was to try to tie the site together and make everything match and make everything unique.
It’s not the most unique blog layout ever, it’s not mind blowing, but this site is a blog – not a news portal, not a social network, a blog. There are still things we need to finish and things we need to perfect but we were excited to launch it on May 1st.
What’s next?
My next task is to teach Noah to format his posts so that they don’t look so awful…
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Ben Bleikamp wrote OkDork v3: It's Live on April 30th, 2007 and there are 23 comments. There will be one more after you add yours, though. Read more posts by Ben Bleikamp. Want to subscribe?
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Noah Kagan is a diarist. He likes to write about himself in third person and he enjoys writing about business. His ideas are the products of divine inspiration from Steve Jobs.
What is OkDork?
OkDork is Noah Kagan's blog. It is run on the sexiest blog platform around, WordPress. The blog design was done by Ben Bleikamp using XHTML, CSS, and Photoshop CS3.
23 Responses to “OkDork v3: It's Live”
April 30th, 2007
6:38 pm
test
April 30th, 2007
6:52 pm
Nice, neat, clean, sweet!
April 30th, 2007
7:21 pm
Nicely done. Looks great.
April 30th, 2007
8:04 pm
Ben,
You are too expensive:) High cost = high quality, or so my mom thought when she bought me a green polka dot shirt a few years back.
Seriously, you are amazing!
April 30th, 2007
8:07 pm
Very nicely done…
April 30th, 2007
8:11 pm
How can we make it even more interactive? I am not necessarily as concerned about page-views. I want more readers/subscribers. Thoughts?
Basically, I want more people getting more traffic from more readers…
April 30th, 2007
8:33 pm
love the green machine.
April 30th, 2007
8:45 pm
Good job Ben! It looks very professional.
Tonight im gonna jerk off to the site.
April 30th, 2007
9:37 pm
Nice, clean redesign … looking forward to seeing it polished!
April 30th, 2007
10:39 pm
Green is In. Love da Bubbles. Gr8 Job, Ben
April 30th, 2007
11:30 pm
As Mims would say “this is why im hot”.. err, anyways this theme is hot! I wanted to do a reboot but I’ve been slammed with school recently. Ben used all the right hues of green. I’m loving the bubbles, reminds me of http://yodel.yahoo.com.
see ya in june noah!
April 30th, 2007
11:36 pm
Me like v2 better.
April 30th, 2007
11:41 pm
CSS Reboot Day…
It’s May 1st meaning you will be seeing many redesigned sites today thanks to CSS Reboot, which I participated in last year. I would have liked to reboot this year but school has been overwhelming this semester. I just noticed that Noah Kagan red…
May 1st, 2007
5:42 am
I like it! The green is mean!
May 1st, 2007
6:02 am
Nice changes. I like the “browse by topic” bar up top.
May 1st, 2007
7:41 am
Looking good! I see a striking similarity between the green on the new OKDork and the green on mint, coincidence, hum?????
Will
May 1st, 2007
7:43 am
Oh, two more things…..are you going to run top commenters just by month or will we see an aggregate view (I want to regain my top spot from Sri). Second, I think you should update the pic to be a more current Noah version, sporting the fro and all!
May 1st, 2007
9:47 am
looks great :]
May 1st, 2007
11:44 am
Thanks for all the compliments
May 1st, 2007
12:50 pm
Ben, nice redesign!!!!! I don’t know if this crossed your mind, but how about having the bg image static as a background.
Noah, I’ll send more articles your way soon, school is killing me.
May 1st, 2007
5:26 pm
Noah, what is the font that you use for the OkDork portion of your logo? It’s super slick and I really would like to use it for a resume of mine. Thanks and nice work with the redesign.
Nick
May 1st, 2007
5:45 pm
The font used for the OkDork portion of the logo is MetaBook. I think it’s at fontshop.com…not sure though.
January 30th, 2009
2:06 am
Congratulation, it was very interesting surfing around here, It was a great pleasure for me to visit and enjoy you site. Keep it running!
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