Valley PR Blog

Behind the scenes of our redesign

By Dan Wool on July 7th, 2008 In Valley PR Blog

This is a special guest post by Dan Ritz of Forty, the marketing agency that redesigned Valley PR Blog.

After being around for close to two years and growing into one of the top 500 blogs in the world for public relations, marketing, and social media, the editors of Valley PR Blog were getting the feeling they’d grown out of their original website and needed to present themselves with more clarity, professionalism, and authority.

At that point, several people from Forty we’re excited to find out Valley PR Blog was looking for some web marketing help. We both thought it was a match made in heaven and got to work.

The Issues:

After a few discussions we all came to the conclusion the design of the website was weak in a few key areas:

• Not a strong sense of community
• No compelling connection to the industry
• No distinctive style and personality

Forty’s Approach:

We wanted to create an environment online that gave a stronger sense of who’s posting the articles and showcasing comments in a way that let people know there is an active and strong following. Then, we wanted to give a strong focal point on a featured article to get people into the flow of the website.

As a visual exercise to make sure everything is shown a compelling and engaging way, we sketched out several ideas and came to a great solution:

After the structure and hierarchy of the site was worked out, we began developing the visual styles of the website with a few key intentions:

• Bring a strong print metaphor to the website
• Create the atmosphere of a news source rather than a personal journal
• Be simple and bold to denote quality and authority

Current Situation:

It’s been a little over a month since the new website has been launched and getting into any specific traffic stats like uniques visitors, page views, length of stay, and bounce rates is going to be a bit misleading. It’s hard to prove that any spikes or drops are direct results from the redesign until we get 60-90 days out. We’ll make sure you know any interesting finds with the results as we find them.

Until then, here’s what a few people have said:

“This looks F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C”
- Richard

“Wow, I LOVE this!”
- Francine

In Conclusion:

In two more years, the Valley PR Blog will be ranked in the upper eschalons of the public relations, marketing, and social media blog world — and then may need another redesign to represent it appropriately… at least we think so!

Thanks for reading Valley PR Blog. We hope we’re making Phoenix proud.

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