I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts online today, and one thing that struck me on quite a few of them was the readability of the page.

I found myself enjoying blogs that had rather minimal amounts of “stuff” on the page above the article contents. Instead of a big logo and a long list of navigation links, most of them had a small (but identifiable) blog title, a few links, but then straight to the post.

While I’ve been a fan of minimal layouts for a while, I always had the idea that I needed to have as many links as possible in my navigation menu. And my name had to be huge to make sure that everyone knew who the person behind the blog was.

But since doing a lof reading of others blogs, I realised that I was designing it for myself, rather than for any potential readers.

So based on this, I’ve made a few small adjustments:

• I’ve swapped the big animating title into a small title in the top left.
• The (single) advert has moved to the bottom of the post.
• The navigation menu has shrunk and is inline with the title.
• The meta information on a post is more clear, and I will look to add reading time to this soon.
• Post titles are larger when viewing specific posts.
• The dark blue colours used for dark mode have been replaced with a more neutral tone.

You can view the new design on my blog at chrishannah.me. But here are a few screenshots:

No doubt I’ll be making a few more tweaks in the next few days, but I do hope that the new design is more usable for readers.