Sunday, February 17, 2008

Case Study-Blog Good Girl Gone Shopping

Diary of a Personal Shopper gets a makeover!

Elana is a successful columnist and senior editor for Agenda Magazine and DP Mag. She is not just a great writer, she is a fashion guru in her own right.

She is trying a new venture. She is launching herself as an image consultant. She knows her stuff, but how to make sure her web image matches her expertise? Elana hires Business Trendista to style her web image.

She loves combining colorful things, adding a "splash of color". But her blog was a bucketful! The bright color was very distracting and detracted attention from her fabulous content.
Sample of Elana`s former blog.

Elana needed a couple of things-To establish a web identity with a logo or character, maximize the space on her blog as her old template has so much info it was too long, communicate with her readers with feeds, join other blogging communities, uncluttering some of the extra badges and monetizing her blog.

After getting a logo and a girly character, she had a three column template designed to match her style. We wanted to mimic the feel of Betsey Johnson`s web site.

Her site is very clean and has splashes of color that do not overwhelmed visitors. Color is used to accentuate areas of interest and the same was done here.

Her new template has three columns, allowing her to sell her space to advertisers, without making her page extra long. She also will have links across the page to important post that double up as"pages" for the relevant information her clients need to know. Just like a website would!

She burned her feed using a service that allows you to subscribe to the feed via email, which basically makes her blog a great newsletter. She already saw an increase on the amount of time that people are spending on her blog, which means people are actually reading her blog. She is establishing herself as an image consultant and creating a following.

Can her current presence be improved? Absolutely... more on that later!

4 comments:

ShanSoPink said...

You did a FABULOUS job on Elana's blog! The old design definetly was not reflective of her awesome style. I love what you've done!!

Good Girl Gone Shopping said...

I already FEEL like a better blogger with this new design. Thanks Shan - you're right. I feel like Elaine's vision and redesign has definitely helped to produce something that more accurately reflects who I am and what I do. Elaine is awesome in what she does! I highly recommend her to anyone wanting to make the most out of the blog and/or Web site. She'll change your life!!!!

KDC Events said...

Elana's site is looking fabulous!

hija4 said...

Could we add this on my list of things I must hire you to do for me. You are quite the web haute couture designer.