Ben Bleikamp's blog about technology and college

Realignment of the Four Hour Work Week Blog

I recently had the privilege of working with Tim Ferriss, the author of Four Hour Work Week, to redesign his blog. A redesign is a bit of a strong term - Tim and I didn’t drastically change the blog’s look and feel as Darren and I did with the ProBlogger redesign.

We kept the same colors, the same general structure, tightened up the visual design and reworked some elements of the site to make it more useful to regular visitors and make the best content easier to find for new visitors. You’ll recognize the popular posts JavaScript widget from ProBlogger.net (something that a lot of recent blog designs have included) and the images rotating at the top courtesy of a quick hack from Chris Pearson.

We Didn’t Change The World of Blog Design

There was no reason to approach Tim’s blog and completely rework the site. It’s a traditional blog and it’s used by tons of people who read Tim’s book - meaning for a lot of his visitors it’s the first (and only) blog they read. Giving them the “traditional” blog look definitely helps them navigate the site and read posts, which is what blogs are all about.

The popular posts widget is actually the same JavaScript from ProBlogger.net (I will write a tutorial about how to implement something like this on your own blog soon - please stop emailing me about it!). We did change the order of the tabs and made “Latest Hits” the default tab. This gives new users an idea of what’s popular on Tim’s blog at the moment and it gives repeat visitors a changing list of popular posts so they don’t get bored.

We kept the standard 2 column blog structure that hundreds, maybe thousands of free templates use - and I don’t think it makes Tim’s blog look any cheaper or any more standard. There was no reason to go with three columns on Tim’s site. I tend to approach design from the stance that I am trying to solve problems, and there weren’t any problems that could have been corrected with a 3 column layout - so why change it? We changed other elements of the site to make them more unique (rotating header images) and used bright colors that are familiar to his readers (both his book and his previous blog design use green). And lets not forget - blogging is about content, and Tim writes solid, unique content on a regular basis and the goal was to make that as easy to find and read as possible.

One of the first things Tim and I discussed was increasing his subscriber count. He was a big fan of ZenHabits RSS feed area and had watched the subscriber count there sky rocket, so we used the same button (from iStockPhoto, I think) and general structure. One item that Tim came up with that (I think) is really cool is the 7 Reasons to Subscribe page. The page lists reasons to subscribe then provides users with subscribe links as well as a page explaining what RSS is. For a blog that gets a lot of visitors that aren’t familiar with blogs or RSS, this is incredibly important and I am excited to see how well the 7 reasons turn visitors into subscribers.

Which plugins were used?

Alex King saved the day again - we are using both Popularity Contest and Twitter Tools on the site.

FlickrRSS pushes out his 6 latest pictures on Flickr.

We also used various plugins to get social bookmarking links and buttons working on single posts.

We are still ironing out any bugs and browser issues that people point out, so let us know if you see anything that is way off or looks wrong.