When it comes to updating the look of your blog, there are a lot of decisions you need to make. One of the most important decisions you will make is how far you want to go in the redesign stage. That is, determining whether or not to completely rebrand your blog, or just refresh some of the current elements of your design.
The design of your blog is one of the top contributing factors to how viewers will judge your blog. It’s all about first impressions, and whatever you can do to make the best first impression, you might actually see some people sticking around.
The important thing about creating a great first impression with a design isn’t always about the beauty of the design, but the memorability. If you have flashy graphics, that may be what makes your design memorable. But there are so many different elements that can make a design memorable other than complex illustrations. Things as simple as color and structure can be just as important.
So when the time comes for your blog to get a little design tuneup, what is the best way to approach it? Should you go for a full-blown redesign (rebranding) or come up with some tweaks to your current design (refresh)?
Rebranding vs. Refreshing
Today, the advantages and disadvantages of rebranding and refreshing your blog design are gone over. What do you think is the best way to update the look of your blog?
Rebranding
To rebrand your blog, you are introducing an entirely new look and feel to your blog. There is really no limit to what you can do with a rebrand as your are changing the old brand entirely. Generally, there isn’t much left of your old design after you rebrand your blog.
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Creates opportunity to fix your brand
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Create buzz
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It’s nice to add something new
Usually when first starting out as a novice blogger, you don’t have the best ideas in the world. After a few months of getting to know your niche, and what design elements work best for it, you may get some new ideas that could make your new brand better than your old one. Maybe a new color scheme will work better, or moving your sidebar to the other side of your blog will help. Completely changing the look of your blog gives you a plethora of opportunities to improve what didn’t work so well with your old brand.
The great thing about change is how much you can talk about it. If your regular readers hear how you have changed the entire look of your blog, some excitement will brew up inside of them and they will undoubtedly come to your blog and see what you have changed. Buzz isn’t just limited to your readers, many people out there are fascinated with design and will check out a site with a new design as a place for inspiration.
If you have kept that same design up for a few years, then it’s very likely there are people who are bored with it. With a total blog redesign, you are adding something entirely new to your blog. A blog that keeps pushing out articles is great, but it’s not as interactive as adding new features and showing that you are still committed to giving your readers a nice experience.
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Causes confusion
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It’s a lot of work
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Start from scratch
This goes back to the idea of “memorability” I talked about earlier. If you change everything that people once recognized your blog by, you can cause confusion and other harmful effects on people’s perception of your blog. Changing the brand, the thing that people recognized your blog by, is a very risky move and doesn’t always work out in the best way.
A rebrand takes a lot of time as literally every last piece of your blog is changed in some way. This time could be spent on working on improving other areas of your blog like the content aspects, and because a rebrand is so risky and not always successful – you may just end up wasting time.
The new brand of design you are introducing to your community will need to take time to become recognized. You basically tear down your old brand in its entirety when you throw up a new design, so it will take a little time for people to be able to associate with your site with this new brand.
Refreshing
A refreshed blog design is a design that is mostly the same look and feel, just with some structural differences. The changes made are generally not as big as they would be with a total overhaul, and mostly retains the same brand after the design is completed.
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Keeps your brand alive
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It’s less work
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It’s often easier
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Ease confusion amongst readers
A design refresh is all about modifying and improving your current design. Because changes are so minimal compared to a total redesign, the branding of your blog will remain almost completely intact. If the colors your blog started out with are blue and white, and you refresh your colors so they are now blue, white and gray, people will still remember that same color scheme.
Refreshing takes a lot less time to do as you have a current design to work off of already. Ideas could be easier to come by when you are working off of a design you are used to rather than starting from scratch.
A refresh is easier in nearly every way. It’s easier to come up with great new features, easier to introduce to your community, and a lot easier to get used to once it’s actually out.
With a design refresh, often the biggest changes that are made are the ones that take the least amount of time to get used to. Design refreshes are often done periodically over time and any big changes made are usually broken down into smaller, more adaptable steps.
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Changes may be too few
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Fixing things that aren’t broken:
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Need to do it more often
Sometimes, you may not have done enough to restructure your blog. Some features may not be as dynamic as they should have been to be considered a “refresh” or you may have simply not done enough.
Some designers like to try and make things better. Some things they try to “fix” oftentimes don’t need to be fixed, and what was supposed to be an upgrade actually devalues the feature of the design.
The excitement of a design refresh usually doesn’t last as long as it does with a full redesign. So, you will find yourself refreshing your design more than you would if you redesigned it. Generally, if you add a lot of new features to your blog and expand it more – you will need more refreshes to be able to cope with those changes.
When you completely change your blog, you are able to completely customize it to meet your needs now. The more and more you refresh, you have to keep adjusting your layout to make sure everything fits and looks right. Doing multiple design refreshes a year takes up some much needed time.
My Verdict: Refresh
I think a design refresh is the best choice here. One of the easiest ways to remember a blog is by its design. I feel that a complete redesign of it would confuse people about your brand, whereas a refresh would still keep most of your memorable elements intact.
Just take Blogussion for example. The design here has always had two columns, and have a dark gray and red color scheme. The colors are hard to work with at times, as together they make for a pretty bad color scheme for marketing. However, I opened the blog with them, and they have worked out. So, I have always kept the same colors even through all of the design refreshes I have made.
If I went and changed the colors to a blue and gray and added a third column, well that’s a totally different look for the blog. I believe that the reasons for refreshing your design outweigh those of rebranding. It just makes sense, usability wise to just refresh rather than redo your entire design.
But what do you think?
My opinions are there, now what do you think? Are you a person who would rather refresh their design, or come out with a totally new design? Share your opinions here.
Tomorrow on Design Versus
Tomorrow I will be comparing light color schemes and dark color schemes and give you some insight on which I think is the best for your blog.
I hope you enjoyed this comparison, and I’ll see you tomorrow!
The Discussion
Leave a Comment Read Again?Hey Alex! I’m pumped for your competition, dude! This article makes me think of Coke vs. Pepsi. Coke has had the exact same logo for 125 years and they have never changed it. Pepsi, on the other hand, has refreshed (sometimes rebranded) their logo 11 or 12 times.
My opinion: Once you establish a brand, don’t touch it. Unless it is absolutely hideous like my first site
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I agree, in most cases refresh is better than rebrand.
.-= Nick Tart´s last blog ..Interview: Alex Maroko, 5-Month Sprint to 6-Figure Internet Success =-.
That’s a classic example man. It’s more about What these brands mean to people. Pepsi was never a strong brand – they kinda change and their design reflects that.
On other hand, Coke stays… forever. Too many moving parts but it is really a nice example.
.-= King Sidharth´s last blog ..Blogging and the Law of Attraction =-.
I see a new Pepsi logo every year I think. As long as they keep the same colors, I think they will always be recognized by just their logo.
When I started my blog I didn’t know a lot about blog design so I used free templates. When I changed to Thesis, I wanted to have a customized design. So little by little I added to the design to fresh the look. Then in January, I finally made some drastic changes to the design. Most of my design changes come with new versions of thesis. They allow me to design my site without knowing much about coding.
.-= Clara Mathews´s last blog ..Just Chick Flicks Previews Letters To God =-.
Thesis really makes it easy to add a lot of new elements into your design. I am always refreshing this blog design because of how simple it is. Just like you, I started off on a regular theme (non-thesis), but I adapted to it keeping the same general layout intact.
Nice article… But once you have made brand awareness, then you should not change it. Because if you often change then none of the branding design or anything will not stand in the public mind… So this makes some confusion in finding the exact one.
.-= Web Risorsa´s last blog ..Tutorials on Image Editing and Actions in Photoshop =-.
I agree, and that’s what I mentioned in the article. Going back to Nick’s example – if Pepsi changed the colors in their logo, or even the shape of it – how many people would recognize them? It would certainly cause a lot of confusion and harm their brand.
spot on
I feel you can’t go wrong with a refresh but you can go wrong with a rebrand. The thing is, sometimes a rebrand is exactly what is needed. I wouldn’t advise it to a site with a decent amount of traffic.
If a site that got a lot of traffic wanted to rebrand, i think they would have to do a bunch of refreshes over a long period of time. It is kind of like how logos change over time, pepsi for example. Their logo is much different from how it was in the 40s and 50s, but all of the changes have been extremely gradual.
.-= Patrick Toerner´s last blog ..Single Greatest Tip For Success Online =-.
I agree, if your site has good traffic to it then I think your brand is probably working. Go with a refresh in that case.
Nice post. Loved the listings.
Coming to my opinion, I think that in the earlier stages of your blog (when there are few readers), it wouldn’t matter much if every aspect of the blog changes. But, as you say, once the blog is associated with a certain look, changing it wouldn’t be very wise.
That being said, if the design is plain bad not changing would certainly be bad.
All said and done, I agree with you
That’s true. I know popular sites are always slammed for redesigning. Even little refreshments (see Facebook) still get crap about it.
I am force to rebrand my blog since my hosting got suspended. I couldn’t get my files back.
.-= paul | entertainment tonight´s last blog ..Adam Corolla attacks the Filipino and Manny Pacquiao =-.
Wow, that sucks…what host were you on?
Your article is absolutely right. Redesign is always necessary to refresh the website and engaged more visitors. Some time we loose visitors due over design. So it’s very important to reanalyze about “what will be the effect on the site” if we will redesign.
I would like to say rebranding can be good if your design out-rightly sucks. The major change that can occur is to the logo. The logo represents the brand and if it changes then the whole outlook of the blog changes. The logo change can bring a lot of confusion among readers.
I am not a designer, but i use refreshing because it is simpler and also it easier to do
.-= Gautam Hans @ Blog Godown´s last blog ..Additional SEO Tips to Gain More Organic Traffic =-.
It is simpler, that’s the beauty of it!
Hey Alex,
Great post – I think your analysis is spot on. I’m a big fan of refreshes, not so much of rebranding. I see a lot of people rebrand and throw away a lot of the traffic, equity, and link popularity they have when a refresh would have been more than adequate. There are few problems that require a complete restart with a move to a new domain.
.-= Jeff´s last blog ..Welcome! =-.
I always thought of what it would be like if I totally rebranded Blogussion. I bet that would kill the brand almost entirely of this blog if I changed the colors to blue and gray. So I really agree with you Jeff, and that’s why I stay away from rebranding my designs.
I slightly disagree. There are some occasions on which just a refresh cannot achieve the desired effect. Many popular blogs have had to do a redesign because at first they had a downloaded template and then wanted a unique design. Of course this isn’t a problem here at Blogussion as the design has always been unique, but blogs such as Copyblogger, ProBlogger and Daily Blog Tips have had to complete rebranding because the earlier design just wasn’t good enough. Most blogs these days are run on free themes. Suppose the blog got big enough and the earlier design wasn’t suitable anymore. Would a refresh be suitable or a complete rebranding? I am in favour of the full redesign for some people.
My verdict: it depends on your needs. If you’ve already got a kick-ass unique design, but want to change a few features, go with the refresh. If you had a downloaded template and now want a unique design, a complete rebrand would be better.
Great start to a series, Alex! I am a new subscriber of Blogussion, and can’t wait to see what you do with an already successful blog design. Thanks for your great content.
.-= Idrees Patel´s last blog ..Compelling Opening Chapters Written — Then What? =-.
Well this post assumes that you designed for your blog (or got one designed) other wise its not even branded for your needs.
Good point to concider for other though.
.-= King Sidharth´s last blog ..Blogging and the Law of Attraction =-.
Well this post assumes that you designed for your blog (or got one designed) other wise its not even branded for your needs.
Good point to concider thought, keeping in mind the majority of bloggers wanting to save money on design thinking it’s not important.
.-= King Sidharth´s last blog ..Blogging and the Law of Attraction =-.
You do bring up a good point, but even then you could draw inspiration from those templates and put in the most brandable elements into your custom design. I did write this article without really taking into account the bloggers that don’t have a custom design, so it’s actually really good you bring that up!
Glad to have you as a subscriber here, look forward to seeing some more comments from you.
Mhh… I cannot agree more.
The only reason people end up rebranding / redesigning, which is like brand & design faliure of previous one, is beacuse they didn’t spend enough time on creating it in the first place. Often they end up changing it again and again.
I always like to feel the design to fullest before I touch the paper, and I put it all on paper before I tocuh the computer. It really works for consistency in design and always has room for expansion.
Tips for Designing Your Brand/ Wesbite
1. Take notes when you are working on brand for the first time, like why is specific element so. It doesn’t always make sense but do it as much as possible. It serves a lot better when you want to refresh it.
2. During refresh, keep the ‘signature’ style alive so you don’t end up compromising between refresh or rebrand. Eg: Blogussion always kept the ‘speech buble’, ‘typography <3', colour scheme and much more. Rest went from neat to neater.
3. Test: In your mind. Works better than the cofused data you will get from testing on audience.
5. Keep Visiting Blogussion – It inspires the hell out of me.
6. Work on the first few drafts yourself before asking for someone's opinion. Use people's opinion to fine tune. Not to create. I always like that about top-guns: Alex(Blogussion), Chirs Pearson (Thesis, DIY), Brain Clark (Thesis, Scribe, Third Tribe, Copyblogger), Me (LOL).
Some really cool stuff: (not in sequence but well…)
http://www.blogussion.com/news/blogussion-thesis-makeover/
http://www.blogussion.com/news/blogussion-sneak-peak-new-design/
http://www.blogussion.com/news/refreshed-design/
http://www.blogussion.com/news/renewing-blogussion/
Do check out the comments on these posts – awesome stuff.
I always wondered, how is your design so neat and AWESOME?</em
C’mon! Tell us the secret!
PS: Do check out my last post, bloggers will like it:
.-= King Sidharth´s last blog ..Blogging and the Law of Attraction =-.
Awesome stuff King, it looks like a mini-article.
I even looked at those old posts…can’t believe how far we’ve gone since those days.
I would definitely agree with you > Refeshing all the way! While I’m not completely opposed to rebranding, I don’t think it’s always the best option. In the beginning, sure go ahead rebrand all you want, test the water. It’s how we can find a logo and a slogan that works, how we find out what our blogs’ main ‘headline’ should be. However, you can’t have that same ‘oh I remember that blog’ effect on your readers if you change too much. For example look at Coca Cola, their logo has stayed the same all these years but everytime we hit the holiday season BAM! they refresh their look. And we’ve never forgotten them, have we?
I think you wouldn’t need to rebrand your blog once your audience starts increasing. Obviously the brand you have is working, so rather than change it – refresh it. Make it better, reorganize some things that don’t work – but don’t kill it.
I love how everyone is referring to the same Coke logo in this post! But their strategy is definitely working I guess, as we can all recognize that it has been the same and for all we know – will be the same.
I always wish to redesign my blog. However, it really takes time to do so. In addition, i’m not a good in css or html. It is difficult for me to refresh the design oftenly. Anyway, i do agree that the design is kind of brand for a blog.
.-= Kok Siong Chen´s last blog ..Hormonal Therapy to Treat Breast Cancer =-.
If you slowly refresh your blog and take it a few steps at a time, you can have a completely new blog design. Sometimes a good redesign is one that is done over a long period of time.
This is really a great post, I will better go with the refreshing option, but there are sometimes you just have to go with rebranding. Blogussion is an established blog so rebranding will not be that good but a blog coming up can easily rebrand without much problems.
Thanks.
.-= Onibalusi Bamidele´s last blog ..You have to read this =-.
You’re right, since the brand has already been established – why change it? You would have to basically rebuild the brand from the ground up, and it just wouldn’t be worth it if you have an established audience already.
I’ve problem reading this post on IE8. Everything is stretched to the bottom in a narrow ‘content area’.
Oh! What an irony!
.-= King Sidharth´s last blog ..Blogging and the Law of Attraction =-.
I tend to make little tweeks here and there on my blog. Slowly but surely refreshing I suppose.
.-= Christopher´s last blog ..The Truth About Duplicate Content =-.
Definitely Chris! And once you keep doing it, you can end up with a design you’re happiest with in the end.
I guess you could say I did both. I upgraded my already custom theme to add more features with better usability and switched to my personal domain name to boost my branding.
.-= Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Will DEDC Comments Remain Do-Follow? It’s Up To YOU! =-.
I see, your blog has been in the redesign stage for a while now! When do you think you’ll finish it dude? It seems incomplete right now.
It’s gettin there. My readers are eating it up, being “in on it” and all.
.-= Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Will DEDC Comments Remain Do-Follow? It’s Up To YOU! =-.
I prefer to refresh because rebranding something could be worst, because sometimes a brand is easier to remember so you don’t need to rebrand it.
.-= Reza Winandar´s last blog ..This is blog is now Do Follow =-.
such a good information about rebranding and refreshing. thanks for sharing that.
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