Rebranding LE

london eater is the one man eating machine chomping his way through his beloved city of smoke.

Londoneater is officially 4 months old..yesterday. To mark the momentous occasion, I went on a rebranding spree and gave it a nice spit-shine. It’s all about minimalism and slickness going into the new year. From now on, I am no longer kang the konqueror , I’m going to call myself Kang the court jester of LE.

Muahaha.

slick, slick, slick

I’ve done away with the grey backgrounds, bold texts and cluttered sidebars in favour of a super slick, maximum white space, squeaky clean design. Generally speaking though, its a minor facelift as everything is still in the same place, a bit of widget reshuffling, otherwise it’s all pretty much still there. I’m currently in favour of a ‘less is more’ approach to sidebars – let’s face it, you’re not going to have the time to go through my many links ( more on this later ) , it’s just confusing with so much content crammed into two small side bars. So from now on, everything is uncluttered and and the above-the-fold stuff is what you need to surf the blog:

  1. search button,
  2. an rss feed subscribe widget (please do subscribe to all my updates via rss or email – afterall, it’s free and 100 % no spamming ) ,
  3. a swirly tag cloud for candy and
  4. a calendar so you can browse my latest additions.

That’s it! Clutter-free and easy on the eyes.

You’ll notice that I’ve incorporated a prominent ‘featured posts’ slide show smack in the main content area above the latest posts. I thought it’d be a good way for new readers to get acquainted with the historically popular posts. Go have a play with it at the home page if you wish. Personally, I don’t think much of slide shows, I just want to read the newest updates when I read blogs – but it’s added touch I suppose. We’ll see how it works out – comment on what you think of it please. Other than that, new pictures will be bigger now – 12% to be exact. Up to 560px from a previous 500px. I think bigger pictures tend to be more impactful.

new headers and revamped sub-pages

  

I’ve been cracking my head over how else I can brand the site, came up with all sorts of designs for the logo and I think I’m quite happy with the new look (for now) . I’m going to start calling myself kang at LE when commenting now -not that there are many kangs out there to begin with- but i think LE is nice.

What do you think of the new branding folks? Like? Dislike? Banu of befoodiealready said she prefers the old header… what do you think? I kept cheesecake.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I spend a good chunk of my time organising my posts into subpages for your convenience. You can find the link to each subpage on the nav bar. I’ve been slowly upgrading them over the months, while they are not what I would like them to be yet – they are beginning to take shape, I like to think of them as mini-hubs, like the restaurant page for instance where each review is made into a little square widget. Click to get to full article. There’s also a great big google map and I’ve drop-pinned all the places I’ve eaten at too. Go check it out here.

 

For the benefit of the rss readers, here’s a little sneak at the rest of the pages, starting with the wine section:

 

The just foods and london sections:

And the links page, I’m really proud of and would want to keep it up to date on a more consistent basis:

Sometime next year, I’ll make the links page into a ‘mini-blog’ in it’s own right complete with a photo of the week/link of the week kind of thing. The idea is to make the subpages come alive so in addition to the main blog, there will be other stuff happening elsewhere on the blog too. In my mind, I think of it as a sideblog in addition to the main blog. Don’t know how I’m going to have the time to do it all though. Till then, do watch this space.

What do you think of the new stuff folks? Do you have any advice or suggestions as to how I can make things better?

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Comments (3)

  1. Pingback: eating&reading 23rd Dec 08: The superduperspecialchristmaseatingbingeingjunkalongextravanganza roundup — London Eater

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