GUIGalaxy: Summer 2010
GUIGalaxy was redesigned and formally relaunched a couple weeks ago, after resurrecting from a 3+ year hiatus in late 2009. The site is a fun little outlet on design, programming, and WordPress in general — basically all things nerdy. The big leap for GG in ’09 had been porting its functionality (and purpose) over to a single-focused, WordPress-driven format. I think as a live proof-of-concept, it did fairly well.
There were of course elements that proved unsuccessful:
- Overall look-and-feel: while well-organized and focused on the post content, there was a lot more room to play with the GUIGalaxy fun aesthetic that’s been established over the years
- Buried posts: even though I can’t update the site several times a day … or even once a day, sometimes … quite often some of the more popular posts became lost on sub-pages
- Reviews: a nice added feature, but ultimately too time-consuming to maintain any relevance
- Global links: too much prominence in relation to content category linkage
- Global login and search bar: considering I’m essentially the only one logging in, this control became extraneous. In the stead of searching, quick (category) granularity via tagging could give instant targeted results, per post
- Sponsor ads: for the finite amount of revenue these were actually generating, their prominence in the visual hierarchy was far too great; could be relegated to a single instance, integrated into post flow
Once some time blocks presented themselves, I sought to address the above issues. The end result is something that I think is much more successful in relation to the previous iteration’s shortcomings. A much more fun design with featured (popular) articles front-and-center, category navigation prominence to global (now footer-based), and intelligent tagging with quick social media sharing attached to each post. I’ll probably hate it and pick it apart again in a few months, but for now, it’s Miller time.