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A Shave and a Haircut →
Shawn Blanc discusses the subtle design adjustments to his site and makes notice on the importance of maintaining that personal brand you’ve established with your readers without compromising the blog experience that may arise due to changes implemented:
When you read someone’s site you are imagining their voice. Not only is that voice influenced by the style of their writing, but also by the design of the site itself. Drastically changing the colors and fonts of a site can have serious impact on the reader’s pre-established and familiar voice of your site.
Very often we feel the constant need to change design elements around on our site and while the experimentation is done mostly in my part to challenge myself with new web techniques, I feel that the more I “refresh”, the less I give myself the opportunity to establish a mental image of my presence and writing through my blog to readers.
When you think of sites like Daring Fireball or Kottke, you not only know what to expect from their writing but you also recognize the stage on which the content will be presented. For example an avid reader to these blogs already has a mental snapshot of Gruber’s customary gray presence or Jason’s white background in their head even way before they’ve visited the site.
Any deviation from this accepted depiction that readers have from your blog is what Shawn strived to maintain and nailed and it’s something that I hope to accomplish as well. For this reason, I’ve vowed not to make any drastic changes to my site for the rest of the year. When you visit my site 6 months from now, I want you as the reader to already know what to expect my site to look like and not feel lost. I want you to recognize my colors, my look and hopefully my writing.
