If you’ve been active reader of 1stwebdesigner, you may have heard I have been planning big redesign for a long time. I think I’ve spent several months analyzing other similar blogs, thinking about features we need to include and just to understand which ones just don’t work.

I consider new redesign will be complete site relaunch, we’ve got a lot of positive feedback about new redesign already, when we tweeted about it and gave a sneak peek insight in new design, you can still see it on my Deviantart profile (not final version though, we are making small improvements all the time).

Just to let you know few days ago we discussed all details and Daniel from PushingPixels (he wrote few awesome coding articles before some time if you recall) started to work on site to get it live and working! Very excited to see how this whole collaboration will work out, but I am pretty sure you will be impressed as well!

Planned relaunch date will be August 30

Subscribe to our newsletter now to get more info:
–  that’s right we will celebrate our 2 years anniversary and completely new look will be one of the biggest gifts from me to you together with a huge list of giveaways, new features and more! We are patient and we think we will get everything ready in 2 months, we want to test everything for your best experience!

More about new design & features

Clean Look and A lot of whitespace

I made a lot of mistakes in previous site designs and actually just modified themes or used frameworks, I think we’ve got 3 different design versions already. Now I understand how important look and design is and I want to give appropriate look to our site to prove we know what we are talking about. No more dark backgrounds and we will keep it simple and really easy to read! New design will be really light –  for example, we won’t use tagging at all from now ( at least not visible one, though for inner search and Google we will still use it). Why is that? Simple –  people just don’t use tags anymore, much more powerful feature is related, most commented, tweeted posts allowing people to easily filter which are the most important points for them. What do I mean with clean look? –  let me show you, I did huge research about minimal objects in webdesign short time ago.

Social Promotion

What will change here? We will allow you to see last month most active discussions and most tweeted posts because we believe those both values are the best way how to make estimated value of each post. Why we need it? Simply because we release now ~12 posts per week, ~50 posts per month and it may become hard for usual reader to keep up and read all of these articles. Of course, we are working hard with all the guest authors to maintain high quality, but maybe you are interested just to see which articles have most active discussion –  to join in there, or which articles took the most attention on Twitter? We will have handy featured article field at top of page to let you know just that! From now on we will focus just on the most important social media sites to let you evaluate each post a lot easier. If article has been bookmarked 200–300 times, there must be something worthy right?

Completely new article sorting

We are working on completely new categorization because now just it’s impossible to find something, we have 430 articles published where many of them just fall very deep into archives and we wanted to make your browsing through our site much easier. We will have also self descriptive icons for each category for better user experience since we know how powerful visual memorization is. And now to two most important changes in my opinion:

Premium Membership

Yes, 1WD will  be going premium as well, because we believe we have a lot to teach and offer to you and small compensation for premium content would be just fair. Ok, what we mean with premium membership and what we will offer? Since almost everybody in our audience are related with design, we will provide you with everything you should need:

• Different discounts from popular companies, allowing you to save some money where possible
• Premium icons, Wordpress themes, textures, templates etc.
• Premium tutorials walking you through Designing and Coding process altogether!
• and also few surprises which I will reveal only on release date!

Before deciding about going premium I bought all the possible premium memberships in design field I could find to investigate how much is it worth? I was myself surprised –  looking at that all quality stuff I get there just for paying monthly fee was amazing. I just compared the same things if I would buy them separately in theme shops or icon shops, I am saving money even if I download just one theme! Of course, there is another question –  do you need that premium content if you can get so much things free? But that’s why it is premium –  you really receive the highest quality in big chunks! People work on premium content so much more and I am planning to do the same –  it’s like working with client where you really need to work on giving out the best!

E-mail Newsletter

Yes,  and finally I wanted to talk about E-mail newsletter at most! We will be starting to write regular insights about what’s happening behind the scenes allowing you to feel like you are inside our team –  you will get the chance to know everything before others will! Question –  Why I wanted to start newsletter right now? Answer is easy –  I just feel we own yet another ordinary design blog and don’t want to allow that! I believe e-mail newsletter is great chance to get in touch with you guys even more, maybe find new friends, collaborations, give you some more exclusive information..but what’s in it for you? Okay, I will make myself clear writing down bullet points to show what I want to include in newsletter:

• Regular behind the scenes insights in 1stwd site development, future plans;
• Hottest news in design industry –  ones you really need to know about industry as well as local news about site redesigns, new project launches!
• Free premium stuff –  that’s right, before we release premium, we will offer several premium like freebies for you just through e-mail newsletter. These freebies are meant for you to understand what to await from premium membership in future. For now it will be just something exclusive for our loyal readers which follow to our newsletter!

We are starting our newsletter from today and we welcome you to subscribe to it right now! We promise we will never share your email to third-party people and send you just quality information! If you want to unsubscribe you can do it in any moment, but I hope I will not make you so bored and disappointed! :)