New Haircut?

Yep, thanks for noticing. As you can probably see, PhotoGuides has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Whilst the colours and iconic style of PhotoGuides has remained fairly close to the original, the whole structure is evidently different. Here’s why we’ve redesigned.

The main focus for this redesign was to allow PhotoGuides to develop and become a strong contender in the world of online tutorials. Whilst the old website looked pretty nice, I felt it lacked usability. Content struggled to flow and it was impossible to support more than four categories. This was a huge burden to the concept of development, because it simply meant the website couldn’t expand, and even if it did there would be no way of sharing the great new content.

When I was asking for feedback on the old website design, most of it was positive. People liked the simple, elegant style of PhotoGuides. They liked how all the focus was on the tutorials and thought that the featured posts slider was pretty cool. It was clear that everyone liked the style and appearance of PhotoGuides.

Thanks to this feedback, I felt it was important to keep the website looking the same way. It’s still simple, it’s still elegant, the featured post slider is still pretty cool and thanks to the clear structure of the design, all of the focus is still on the guides and tutorials. The biggest change however comes when you scroll below the featured slider. Now every new post is displayed chronologically so you can scroll away and click anything that catches your eye. The structured sidebar also allows me to feature cool new stuff like posts and members content, and the categories bar just below the title also allows every section of PhotoGuides to easily be discovered and explored. All of these little things help to make the site so much more usable, and open doors for expansion in the future.

I’ve got a few ideas of where I want the website to head in the future, a few ideas of sections i’d like to open up, guides and tutorials to write and podcasts to release. This new design has opened up doors for expansion and is the key to achieving my goals for PhotoGuides. Thanks again to everyone who offered their feedback.

But what do you think of the new design? All feedback is welcome via the comments or by contacting me. Even if you’re new to PhotoGuides, what do you think of the new design, not just based on appearances, but on usability as well?