Twenty Set Redesign
Hi! Welcome to Twenty Set. Here you will find 4-5 new articles every week about personal and professional development written specifically for the young professional. If you like what you read, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Next week I’m going to start revamping Twenty Set. I’ve been wanting to do this since starting the blog, and I have next week off of school, so it’s finally a good time. What I need from you is suggestions.
Here are the things I know I want to change:
- color scheme and fonts - I don’t dislike the theme from a functionality standpoint, but I want to distinguish Twenty Set from others and brighten it up a bit.
- tagline - I’ve come to realize the tag line is not only boring, but not truly representative of Twenty Set’s readership. Help me come up with something better.
- header image - I want a better “logo” or symbol to represent Twenty Set. Suggestions welcome.
I’m also considering adding two pieces of functionality. One is a way for readers to share their favorite links with me so I can link to their ideas in my articles. I also want a way to share my favorite links with readers on my website, in case people want to see what I’m reading. I still can’t decide if I want to use something like del.icio.us or just code something myself, the way I want it, because I’m a software engineer and I can :).
The second is a way for readers to chat with me, live, via my website. I already chat with some readers who have contacted me directly, and I think it would be cool to chat with more. Of course, this could also get completely out of control if too many people are constantly IMing me, but it’d be worth experimenting with.
I’m sure you can think of a million other cool things I could do with Twenty Set, and I’m open to suggestions. So if you have any thoughts on any of the above ideas, or if you have a completely different idea that would be awesome, please leave a comment. And if you haven’t heard, I’m running a contest this week, so every comment counts as an entry!
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Monica O'Brien is the founder of Twenty Set, a website about personal and professional growth and development for the Millennial generation. She has been a blogger since 1998 when blogging was still in its “Dear Diary” form and in May 2007 began blogging for personal branding and profit.
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Hey Monica,
I subscribed to your blog after your guest post on ProBlogger. I’m one of the “twenty set”, and find your content highly relevant to things I’m dealing with. Keep up the good work. Our blog, Tropophilia (http://tropophilia.coom), talks about “change”, and I’m planning to write a post about life changes in the past year: new job, new city, new responsibilities, etc. I’m sure I’ll be linking to you.
We recently designed Tropophilia in conjunction with our move from wordpress.com to a self-hosted install. You can compare the two by checking out our old set-up at http://tropophilia.wordpress.com.
I know Meebo runs an embedded chat widget, but if you’re a Gmail or Google Talk user you might consider their new Chatback feature: http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New.
Regarding your desire to linkshare, we tried a del.icio.us feed for a while but really wanted to be able to comment on the links we were sharing. With the K2 theme we were automatically given the “Asides” feature (you can see this on our main page now), which just moves any posts written in a category you assign to the sidebar. We’re just getting started with it but we’re already in love. I think you can plug this in to your WordPress scheme. Read more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides.
For your logo, I designed Tropophilia’s in about 3 minutes using MS Word and a screengrab. Just play with some cool fonts and extra goodies, and then capture it at the right dimensions using Grab (OS X) or some other screen cap utility.
Hope that helps. Would love to discuss more if you want to shoot an email. And check out Tropophilia, I think you’ll find some things you like.
Take care,
Jarred
http://tropophilia.com
Tim Ferriss talks about Lifestyle Design a lot and your blog is a lot about designing your life, so here’s my shot at a tag line:
Twenty Set:
Lifestyle Design for Millennials
And since you are doing a redesign, I will point out that I like your little category navigation that you have on your front page (where you have the tabs and relevant recent posts), but I also have found that this gets in the way of just simple browsing through recent posts… there’s no real easy way for me to chronologically just scroll back through posts of the last month without a lot of navigation and click. Just my thoughts. Good luck with the project!
Hi Monica. I’ve become a big fan of yours even though I’m not in my twenties anymore (I’m 30). Another quick way to play around with logos is to download Skitch which I found out about via Problogger. It is fab for playing around with ideas and you can even sketch ideas in it. I find even for playing with text that it’s great and it’s totally free. Definitely look at creating a logo that has standout and reflects your brand values. I’m about to embark on a redesign myself so I know what you’re going through. Best of luck and keep up the great work!
Jarred, thanks for the detailed comment! I do use GTalk and their new chatback feature is what I was planning to embed into my site.
I’ve looked at Asides before, but I don’t think they are what I’m looking for. I do love K2 though, and I like your blog header! Thanks again.
Matt, I like your idea. I was thinking something like “Lifestyle Remix. Just Hit Play” Haha. I really have no idea still.
I think you have a good point about the archives. Nobody has mentioned it to me yet. Technically there is a way to through the archives in the bottom left corner. I think I disabled a tab which also allowed people to look through the archives… maybe I’ll enable it again.
NML, I’m glady you like Twenty Set. What you said is part of the reason I want to change the tagline - I don’t think the audience is only millennials. I hate to exclude a legitimate portion of this audience. I definitely want a cool logo - but I’m thinking about getting someone more creative to do it for me. We’ll see.
Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions so far! I’ll probably update this with some color schemes I was looking at over at COLOURlovers.com (Darien’s website, from Young Go Getter).
I would love to know when you post. I tried subscribing by email and it does not work.
I can’t do the RSS yet…still behind on all that… :o)
hey Monica
I like the idea of sharing your favorite links with your readers, and of course allowing them to do the same. I’m looking forward to seeing the site new design. All the best!
Hey Monica
I’m going through some changes at miguelpineiro. I purchased a new wordpress theme, also, I’m moving the site to a stand alone hosting. I wanted to know if you had any advice or tips that might make life a little easier? Thanks for your support and feedback!