Sometime around December we got approval to spend some money on a responsive redesign of our blog. I’m finally comfortable enough with the few remaining bugs to show it off.
I’d floated this idea a few months after I was hired, but it wasn’t until a year or so later that we had the resources to put it together.
The project was completed from start to finish in January 2016. We wanted time to pull some good content together, so we held off the launch until the second week of February.
We kept the design simple. I’m a big fan of content, so it was important to me to keep the design aesthetics very minimal. The logo at the top of the page is similar to the style of the logo on the current LSC.org so that the blog still has a visual connection to the main site. We removed the logo’s hyperlink, so that there was no confusion for the user as to where they would end up if they clicked it.
We moved all of the blog categories and search functionality to a popup menu. This helped to keep the header clean. To distinguish between the blog homepage and LSC.org we added two links to the global header. Again, simple, but effective. Other innovations on the blog homepage include the ability to post featured stories and a footer that includes social media feeds from Instagram and Twitter.
In addition to a blog homepage we also added category pages. This will provide users with the ability to browse similar stories in a more visually appealing way.
On our article pages we added an improved block quote font treatment, social media share options, and featured images. Believe it or not, these were all things missing from the original blog page. I am excited to see how the responsive design affects our engagement numbers. I’m expecting the responsive design to help out tremendously.