Bowser

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’d know by now that John Chow has redesigned his blog.

The redesign work was actually undertaken by Nate Whitehill, and the job probably represents a major promotional coup for his newly formed enterprise Unique Blog Designs, which creates and sells “exclusively designed” Wordpress blog themes.

Needless to say John Chow’s new look has drawn a range of responses (mainly regarding the “busy header” and so called “120 pixel drop”), and while there are aspects of the design that don’t entirely agree with me, overall I like it. Personally I find it more interesting, visually, than the previous design.

Partly driving the redesign (no pun intended) was the desire to increase the blog’s money earning potential, as revenue levels had apparently plateaued.

The more money this blog makes, the more traffic it gets. The old theme was stuck at $12,500 a month and I wasn’t going to break out of that unless I do a redesign.

While I’m sure the new design offers the increased revenue generating opportunities John is looking for, one comment he made about the new design struck me as a little self defeating though.

The new theme has been tested on the latest version of FireFox, IE7 and IE6. If you’re using any other browser, we can’t guarantee it’ll look right.

I’d have thought if you were trying to boost your earnings via your blog, making it viewable and accessible to as many people as possible would be the top priority. Cutting people, or more importantly, paying customers or advertisers, out because they are not using the “right” browser is akin to shooting yourself in the foot, isn’t it?

And I’m willing to bet a fair number of John Chow’s readers are accessing the site with other rendering devices, and non visual web browsers, as well.

These readers would be going a long to being served if John Chow used valid and correct XHTML and CSS, something Unique Blog Designs prides itself on.

All of our themes are built around the Wordpress blogging platform. They contain XHTML/CSS Valid source code and are fully cross-browser compatible.

Yet when I validated the site this morning, I found 152 errors.

In fairness, if that’s the right word, many of these errors appear to be generated by the code some of John Chow’s advertisers use, so the blame can’t be completely placed at the feet of the designer in this instance.

However these errors could be upsetting some of the devices some of John Chow’s readers are using, and could potentially be turning away people who are prepared to advertise on the site.

Third party advertising code, especially that of many of the Pay Per Click vendors, is lacking (to put it mildly; some of it sucks actually) when it comes to standards compliance, as I know from my own experiences.

To be honest though I am surprised why someone with John Chow’s profile, and popularity, would use the services of so many “cost per click” and other advertising programs, when he could probably do very well with private advertising as his designer does!

Finally, I hope the Internet Marketers (all five million of you!) have been paying attention to the John Chow redesign, as well as the recent ProBlogger revamp, because there is a lot to learn from such exercises.

Significant publicity has been generated for each blog as a result, so be sure to tell your readers not to underestimate the promotional potential of a well thought out redesign!