Niche Store Builder Website Redesigned – Feedback Welcome
After several weeks of planning, starting and stopping between several other ongoing projects, and oh… Christmas Shopping, I have completed the Website Rebuild of the Niche Store Builder site.
Hopefully, when you finish reading this post, you will have a better understanding of Why I rebuilt the site. The level of planning that goes into a website rebuild, the new features I added to the new site along the way, and of course, future plans I have at the Niche Store Builder.
Feedback is greatly appreciated and you will find a floating button over there in the left column, that will bring you right to in the comments section of this post from any page of the site. If you experience any issues, want to ask a question, or just provide a general comment, have at it!
Why Did I Redesign The Website?
Great, Timeless Content is Impossible to Find!
My first thoughts of a site redesign came from Rochelle at Niche Store Strategies, more than a year ago! You see, the old site (& WordPress in General) was not too easy to navigate when it came to finding information, older posts, or whatever! It can be a bit of a challenge to use WordPress as a CMS and get all the right content to the right eyes, all the time.
More than a year after her first suggestions, she sent another email stating the same thing again! “I can’t Find _____”, fill in the blank! It was then that I reflected on all the emails I had answered, pointing people to stuff I had already written, but simply wasn’t presented in a way that made it easy to find.
Refocusing the Topics to Appeal to More People
The second reason I chose to rebuild… the demand for information around the orignal topic, Build a Niche Store, is nearly gone. If I don’t create a way to remodel the site around Niche Site Building in general, traffic would ultimately reduce to a crawl.
To that end – I had some soul searching to do. Not long ago, I was considering selling this site and the domain names that go with it to a company that contacted me about it. I could either walk away and abandon everything that has to do with supporting the Niche Website Building community, or… what I ultimately chose to do, I could refocus my efforts to do a better job of filling the void in the space.
My hopes are that the new site brings in a more diverse group of visitors, to compliment those of us already here every week. Instead of focusing on only the affiliate website builders out there, I am going to model a good bit of the content to ANYONE who is building, managing, and marketing their own websites.
In other words – the content you have enjoyed for several years – is about to get a little better and offer additional solutions to those of you who want to do more with your newfound skills!
Planning that Went Into the Redesign Project?
Any website redesign requires planning! What are the goals of the redesign? What new features do you want to offer? What will you do with the site during the redesign process? What about old category or page URL’s and handling the traffic that will continue to come to them? These, along with many other questions will come up and you need to have the answers BEFORE you start picking away at your theme files!
In my case, I knew the following items were KEY to the redesign:
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I did NOT want the site to go down during the process
So, I installed the Theme Test Drive plugin, which lets the site admin choose any theme they want, including those in development, while the browsing public continues to see the theme designated in the admin.
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I wanted an easier way to manage ad sections
So I purchased and installed the OIO Publisher ad manager, which puts everything, including ad space sales, into your wordpress admin.
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I HAD to make the site easier to navigate and find information!
So I elimiated the 36 previous categories, and opted for only 10-15 categories in the new design, each specific to the content is contains. You can see some of them in the main menu-bar at the top. (More on this below)
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I HAD to be sure I had a way to Handle old URL’s
When I originally designed this site, the permalink structure I chose was “/%postname%/.htm”. Meaning, ALL posts were one level behind the main domain, and all had an htm for an extension. This made redirecting posts a non-issue and they are all in the same place they always were, regardless of how they are categorized. Even though post URL’s were a non-issue, I still have to deal with old categories and various other 404’s that may come up. I have used the WordPress Redirection Plugin for quite a awhile, and it fit perfectly into my plan.
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I Wanted to find ways to increase reader involvement!
This site is more than 2 years old and even with waning traffic, carries an average of 11.7 comments per post. While 12 comments per post is great, I want to increase that number! You will find a few new features mentioned below that will keep people coming back more often, and encourage them into commenting more often.
New Features or Areas of the Site
Aside from the improvements in navigation and ad management, I added a few other features to the site, hopefully, to make the site easier to read.
- Larger headings to make scanning an article easier.
- Larger and properly spaced fonts.
- Terms and Privacy Policy – If you have not heard about the FTC guidelines for website publishers, especially in the blogging and affiliate space, you need to read about it now and get an FTC terms and Privacy Statement completed ASAP! You don’t want to be the first example at a cost of $11,000 per violation!
Along with those changes, I added the following plugins to the new design:
- Better Blogroll – which allows me to automatically rotate through the blogroll links, but always show the same number in the sidebar. That gave me the control over the height I wanted.
- Comment Plugger – When you get down to the comments section of this article, you will notice I have added a section just above the comments that mentions the last 5 people, with links to their sites, who have commented on the article. This was put in place to encourage more people to come back more often and comment.
- Comment Remix – Brings the “Reply-To” and “Quote” functions to the comment section, making it easier to reply directly to someones comment, without having to copy/paste.
- Subscribe to Comments – Gives the ability to subscribe to comments you leave, so you can keep up with the conversations.
- Post Tabs – If you have been a reader for any time, you KNOW I like to write long posts. The Post Tabs plugin gives you the ability to write a long post, then break it into manageable sections. I hope this makes these long posts easier to digest!
- WP Greet Box – To show a subtle reminder to visitors that they should subscribe to the free tips and articles I write! Subscribers and people who close the box should only see it once, then it goes away until you clear your cookies.
- Tweet This – To make it easier to share the great content you all find on the site! If you like it… you KNOW you want to share it! :-)
Layout and Design Changes
Looking at the site design, it should be obvious I decided to have a bit of fun on the redesign. The theme started as the free Arthemia and progressed from there. I hacked it apart fairly deeply in order to get the “Construction” look that I was going for.
Rebuilding the theme was actually the easy part and only took a few days. Getting it all to work properly in all web browsers, well, thats another story of several days of code hacking and debugging. As of right now, it works perfect in all but IE6 or older browsers, where there is a 1 pixel offset, and can only be seen in the footer section, pictured on the right. I WILL work out the pixel issue, but for now, I am focusing on the content instead.
Along with the layout change, I also added an Author section to each post. My goal is to attract some great Guest Writers to the site and give them an area to be recognized.
Many of you will also notice I (edit for debug) temporarily removed added a tabber section to the sidebar using the Domtab code. You can learn how to add your own at the Pro Blog Design domtab page. I have a third tab setup, but it is reserved for future use.
Future Plans for the Site
I do still have quite a bit to do on the site – but what is left will be done over time.
Recategorizing All Content
Most importantly, almost EVERY post on the site is held within one single category now! Someof you may have noticed that every post was changed into the “Niche Store Blog” category almost 5 weeks ago! That was the day I decided to make the change and it was one of the first steps I took.
Now, I have the daunting task in front of me to go back through all posts and categorize as many of the posts as I see fit!
My Plan is:
- Find My Own Favorite Posts in Every New Category
- Find the Most Popular Posts in Every Category
- Add them to their New Categories!
I plan on doing this through the use of the Yet Another Related Post Plugin, which shows 5 related articles at the bottom of each single article.
Registered User Favorites
Not yet active, I am testing a new plugin which is in beta form. It allows registered readers to click a link at the bottom of posts, and they are saved to your profile as your favorites. When logged in, you will see a link in the sidebar, taking you to your own special page of saved or fav’s within the site.
FaceBook Niche Builder Group
If you click the Facebook link in the right-side socialize banner, you will notice that takes you to a Facebook group named Niche Site Builders. My goal is to make it just another meeting place for like minded site builders to gather and share ideas!
If you are a facebook user – I suggest signing up. If you are not a Facebook user… you better get on it!!
Comments always welcome… Within a few days, I will break down what I have done, and still continue to do, to minimize the load time on this new theme, which sized in at 622k when originally built!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Busy Day at the Niche Store Builder Site!
- February 2008 and the Niche Store Builder
- Spring Cleaning Week at The Niche Store Builder!
- Build a Niche Store Empire – Get Inbound Links to Your Niche Store Website
- Adding content to your Niche Store Website
- Mark Hansen – The Niche Store Builder
- How do you Optimize a Build a Niche Store Website?
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Looking good Mark..I now however see that I have to scroll horizontally to find the ‘Connect and subscribe’ icons…Maybe you would want to reduce the width..
@Anand Srinivasan – Thanks Anand. I am aware of the browser width issue and it was a metric I looked at before starting the redesign.
Of all visitors to the site in the last 3 months, 1024×768 was the lowest screen resolution at 12% (actually 11.9) of all visitors. Everyone else was in the higher resolution screens and 1280×720 was actually the most widely used at 28% (28.2).
When I decided on the 1100 pixel width of the outer frames, it was taking the wider screens into account. More or less, building for the masses, or 88.9% of the visitor screen resolutions.
Mark
Great redesign! Arthemia is one of my favorite themes, and you’ve customized almost to the point of not recognizing it. Like the little guys in the footer. :) Very nice work!
@Mark Hansen
That makes sense Mark. I’m just checking the site again from my laptop, and yeah, it looks great from here..
I like the new theme … good work as usual….
Hi Mark,
Looking really good, loving the new design/layout. It’s quite clear that a lot of hard work and time has gone into it and it looks good :)
Ben
Mark,
Wow. Seriously, wow.
This is an amazing redesign! I LOVE what you’ve done!!! The little people and the building grids (or whatever they are) add a humorous flair to the site. I’m so glad I pestered you ; )
I am using Safari (the latest version) and the one-pixel off problem exists for me – just an FYI.
I feel like a kid in a candy store with all the changes you made! I can’t wait for the ability to mark my favorite pages from within your site.
VERY well done!!!!!!
Rochelle
@ All –
Thanks for the comments so far! I am very pleased with the way it is coming together so far!
I have found another small bug – and working through it now.
When you click on the “Number of Comments” or “Reply to Comment” link in an email, or on one of the archive pages, the header is automatically be assigned a style of display:none.
Just add the #comment to the end of any URI and you will see the head section disappear. It can be seen within Firebug (If you use Firebug for debugging)
Going through all JS and plugins now to figure out why it’s being injected. I have tried renaming the head section and it still finds that tag and adds the style:none to it. Odd for sure…
Mark
@Mark Hansen – Found the issue related to the Domtab tabber in the sidebar.
The way I debugged the issue was by walking through each of the main site files, header, footer, single, sidebar, removing code blocks one at a time until I saw the desired result.
In the single.php file, when I removed < ? get_sidebar ? > from the code, the problem went away completely.
So I added the sidebar code BACK into the single.php, and moved to sidebar.php, to diagnose within the actual file.
Moving through the file one code block at a time, I found that when removing the domtab function, the issue went away.
Now – I need to figure out what was up with domtab, and possibly go with a jquery function instead.
Mark
Mark-
The redesign looks great. I like how you reorganized everything into the 4 main sections and have them located across the top.
I also liked the construction crane header and how its integrates in to the body.
@Terry – Thanks Terry, PostTabs, the section that breaks your longer posts into sections, can be added to any post or page, in any number of tabs, just by adding: [tab:Title], at the points where you want them to appear within a post.
Mark
Great job Mark! As usual, your project is really on target as the niche world as evolved. I really like the new design (I’m jealous of your coding skills!), and am looking forward to seeing all the great content on this brave little world of ours!
One question: is the “share this…” piece a single plugin for the various sites (Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc), or is it a custom job too? I know that Tweet This is a single plugin, but I’m looking for a new share-this plugin that has a number of different sites and I really like the look of yours.
Happy Holidays to you & the Hansen clan!
@Alice – Happy Holidays to you and yours as well Alice, and thank you for the nice comments.
The Tweet This plugin actually handles everything you see in the share box of the post. It also has options for several others, but I have those turned off.
Mark
Nice redesign. Like the tabbed content, category navigation and easy-to-read layout. Like Anand, I too have to scroll a little horizontally, but no big deal. I’m at 1440×900 on firefox. Nearly impossible to design for every browser and screen setting combination. Love the graphics too. IMHO, ya done good!
@Sonia – Thanks Sonia… I actually checked screen size at many of the lower resolutions and at 1400×900, yours should be fine and have no issues at all, unless you are running any of the tool sidebars that browsers have built in.
If you don’t mind sending me a screenshot – I would be thrilled! :-)
ANYTHING larger than 1145 wide should be fine… and not require any scrolling.
Mark
Too wide on 2 laptops and a Droid. Looks awesome though Mark.
I did a little looking around & found apparently at one time I must have zoomed in (under the view menu) and never zoomed out so it was keeping that setting. I reset it and now everything looks fine, no scrolling needed. Wow, your site looks even better at this setting, LOL!
Mark… looks great. I totally agree with Rochelle. I have tried to find stuff on the site (not just yours) and have had trouble. The redesign looks fantastic. I would agree that it is a bit wide but I usually run a high resolution on my screen, with multiple monitors and have multiple windows up (never full screen). I noticed I had to drag the window out a bit to view the whole site… no biggie… still the design is great. Who did it?
Thanks
Joe
@Bill G – Thanks Bill – Also, thanks for the help getting everything sorted on the mobile platform!
@Sonia – I have a home theatre PC hooked up to a widescreen in my livingroom – Surprisingly, I always need to zoom in the text on it, and you wouldn’t think 14 feet away from the screen would require it.
Anyhow – I do the same thing all the time! Zooming in on a website, and wondering why some other pages get skewed in proportion to the screen on other sites.
@Joe – Same here on the search-no-find Joe. Over the next few weeks, you will all see a few new features at the top of each category page that will address the issue with most popular posts, in addition to having the ability to bookmark your own favorites on the site. Hopefully… it will all result in a better way of finding the content!
As far as the design goes – I do all my own. I have been in the design field for quite a while now (Mid 90’s) and it is actually the most enjoyable part of site work to me.
Mark
Hey Mark
Awesome redesign! It looks great on my super wide iMac. The footer is cute. It reminds me of a game I played when I was a kid. What was the name again?
Anyway, happy holidays to you, Mark.
Yan
The redesign is awesome – I love it. The logo and graphics are amazing!
Hi Mark!
As usually you created another great looking site! A+ job!
Shane
[...] and I know that it’s a lot of information in one post. Seeing as I am in danger of having an Epic Mark Post, I am going to break this up into a two part series and finish up later this [...]
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