A new welcomebrand for 2009

Posted on 12th January 2009 by James Young | There are currently no comments - you can go first!

Welcome to the new version of welcomebrand. This is very much a work in progress and will be constantly evolving as I tweak and edit parts of the site.

The big change is going from my previously very dark, small text orientated portfolio to a more inclusive site making more use of the wordpress system that I previously only used to power the blog. It now powers the whole site and just makes it a little less hassle to constantly need to update single html pages. I know it’s a bit of a gamble as I’ve had great feedback on the old version of the site (you can still view it here for reference) and this is quite a departure from it.

Why this design?

A couple of reasons really. The main one is that I want to make more of an effort in writing useful (I hope) blog entries about design, freelancing and wordpress. I felt the old site was very disjointed and people either visited the portfolio page and left or arrived direct on a blog post and they were two very seperate entities. I think the simplicity of this design / layout will encourage visitors to delve a little deeper into the site.

Yes, it’s a very simple layout – I don’t like clutter. If you take a look around though, you should only ever be 2 or 3 clicks away from any content. This wasn’t the case before and it’s something I’ve been keen to address for a long time.

The big benefit of not seperating the blog from my portfolio is that it really does bring it into one site rather than two distinct entities. This has already reaped improvements in search engine results and I hope will continue to do so as I add more articles and content.

Things I want from this site in 2009

• A new design to improve on SEO and to help encourage growth in readership
• To increase article output and posting
• Increase the number of comments and amount of discussion on the articles
• Open up post topics to suggestions from visitors
• At least double the traffic on the site over the course of the year along with the time spent by visitors on the site

Some housekeeping

Bear with me while I do a bit of housekeeping as this new theme is a lot simpler than the older ones and as such some of the markup used in old posts and pages is now redundant but still positioned incorrectly so I’ll be going through some of the older pages as soon as possible to make them fall into line with this new design.

If you’re looking for the new job feed, sadly it’s broken at the moment, I’m really not sure why – it worked while I was testing the site! I’ll be getting onto that asap. In the meantime, if you’re looking for job or to post a job listing (for free) then head over to company, meet creative