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Nino Film Blog | March 29, 2024

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New blog design coming soon … suggestions welcome!

New blog design coming soon … suggestions welcome!
Nino Leitner

According to my WordPress statistics, this is my 100th blog post. And it is the one in which I announce that this design is obsolete. It has served this site well for over 1.5 years, but it is time for a change.

This blog was originally started when I posted world’s first short film and review of the then-new Canon T2i/550D, bringing huge numbers of people to the site on the first day. Apart from making films, I have always enjoyed writing and that’s why I kept going. And boy, it’s been a very rewarding thing to do – because of all the great people I got to know through my activities with this blog and Twitter. But this was just the start of something that can become much more. It really is time for the next step.

Why change the design, you ask?

Well, while I still like the general look, it’s a bought template that is very inflexible to any design adjustments. If one thing is changed, three others things break. It’s a pain and that needs to change.
Secondly and more importantly, this design is too blog-like, pushing down recent posts on the main site way too quickly if a little more is written in a short period of time. It’s also not always possible to find relevant related posts.
The featured slider on the front page is a buggy thing and takes up way too much space while only showing three featured posts.

In short: A lot of people have a hard time finding relevant content after they saw another blog post they liked. I know that from the simple fact that sometimes posts are rediscovered because they are reposted to Twitter and Facebook, and suddenly hordes of people comment on it like it’s a new thing ๐Ÿ™‚ … While that is a good thing, I think these posts should be more easily found. More posts need to be displayed on the front page without cluttering it – a magazine layout is the way to go.

This will also mean that I will post more on this blog from the time the new design goes up! A bunch of new categories will be introduced and more content will be here from the start – more on that when it’s online.

My good friend Arne Nostitz is not only a very gifted fellow filmmaker, one of his many other talents is “a good eye” for design, and he’s the one in charge of the reboot. A big thanks already for his help and his great ideas and input!

Suggestions

While we’re working on the new design, I also want to hear from you what you like and what you dislike about the current site. What do you want to see changed? I really want to hear honest thoughts and any input is greatly appreciated. This community is so great and engaging, I want to do my best to give back by sharing my experiences, learnings and knowledge the best way I possible can. Help me share this stuff better! Thank you and sound off below, no restrictions ๐Ÿ™‚

Comments

  1. Hi Nino!

    Well the first thing I would do is make the “search” option more visible. It took me around 1 minute to find it!

    Next I would place the “categories” badge somewhere more visible.

    The facebook badge is far too big in my opinion. Is good to make it easy for people to find you, but there’s no needing of showing them your actual posts there.

    Have a look to all content organisation in this wordpress blog: http://spanish.martinvarsavsky.net/ you can take ideas from there.

    And so far that’s all that comes to my mind ๐Ÿ™‚

    • Thanks Pedro! I agree with all you said … you’re not the first who says the Search field is hard to find. This will change with the entirely new design!

  2. Just found your site while I had a bit of down time. I just had my website built in wordpress and I’m very happy with it. Very easy for me to add content and change content. Good luck with future changes and success.

  3. It’s about time ๐Ÿ™‚
    Just kidding! Agree with search even though I found it quickly first time I needed it but the way it works was slow to respond.

    Anyhow, if you are staying with WP then I would recommend to choose one of StudioPress Premium child themes and their Genesis framework. You thought that WP is simple to set-up, wait until you see extras by them that allow quick and simple customization.

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