Introducing the Redesigned Blog Pages on ActiveRain

 

Over the last year, we have been working with a professional design firm (along with the amazing help of a large group of our Ambassadors) to create a new design for ActiveRain. We have already overhauled the navigation header and the profile pages on the site as well as made numerous SEO enhancements.

Today, we are proud to unveil the next piece of the project, a redesigned look for the blog pages on ActiveRain. The impetus for this redesign was to put a central focus on the content on the page and the ways that someone can interact with you, the author, or with the content itself. We also strived to keep people on the content for longer and give them a more obvious path to find additional content from you as the author.

This new design is the start of creating an experience on ActiveRain that is once again cutting edge and that prominently displays the hard work you put in every day to create great content. 

We made vast improvements to:

• Individual blog post pages
• My AR blog Page (your main blog page)
• Comments
• SEO

To learn about how to set up and get the most from your newly designed blog pages, check out the ActiveRain University post on updating your account.

Let's walk through some of the highlights of the newly designed pages.

Blog Post Page

This is the centerpiece of this most recent redesign effort. The overwhelming majority of traffic on ActiveRain comes to the site via a blog post page. More specifically a 'blog post page' is the exact URL of a specific blog post. For 90% of our visitors, they enter the site on one of these pages after having found your blog post in the search engine results (or possibly because you drove them to the page yourself by sharing on social media).

The focus of this redesign was on bringing the content more front and center and making the calls to action on the page more obvious. You can see from the new design that less focus is being given to the old sidebar and header images than before. As we looked across the landscape of prominent online publishers, we saw that in every case the focus of the page was the content itself and not the header or the design elements on the page.

Here are a few highlights of the new blog post pages

Right Column

A more streamlined virtual card on the top right hand side of the page. This v-card uses your profile photo and the same header image as your profile page. All of the information on that v-card comes directly from your profile and can be changed by editing your profile. Notice the use of the new call to action button from your profile page. This is also the area where (if logged in) you can 'follow' or subscribe to another member's blog.

Below the v-card is the most prominent call to action on the page. The lead widget has been incorporated into the page to give someone the chance to ask you a question. And you can control the wording on that lead widget by editing it on your profile page. We saw an increase in the number of contacts through ActiveRain after switching to the new lead widget form on profile pages and therefor made this element a prominent part of the redesign.

As you move down the right hand column, we pull in similar data from your profile to display the areas you cover, a set of 'real estate resources' (which you can manipulate from your profile page) as well as a list of recent posts and your featured listings. And below that is still the ability for you to add widgets to your blog post page (which is done from your blog settings page as always).

Again the idea here was to make these pages have a clear and obvious path for the consumer. We want them to reach out and connect with you.

The Content

On the left hand side is where your content resides. The title is very prominent. This pulls people into the content. If they just did a Google search and found your content we want to reinforce to them right away that they are in the right place. 

Up near the top is an ability to share your content on a readers social media channels in a couple different ways. They can easily 'like' or '+1' the content on Facebook and Google Plus or they can actually share the link on up to six different social media platforms. They also have the option of sharing your post via email. It was important to make these sharing options prominent as more and more traffic on the internet originates via social media channels.

Then you have the body of the post. Not a ton actually changes with this except the fact that the column width for blog posts is now fixed at 705 pixels wide. An awesome side effect of making the blog width column a fixed width is that the blog post editor is now an exact match. Which means if it looks that way in the blog editor, it will look exactly the same once you publish the blog post (if you've been around here a while, you'll really appreciate this). One thing you will want to probably get used to using to make your posts look really good is the 'justify' option on the blog editor. This makes the right hand column of your blog uniform and makes your posts better looking (at least in my opinion)

Below the blog content itself we've slightly broken out your signature line. You can update your signature line from the blog settings page and many of our members will use this as a place for consumers to potentially connect with them on social media and/or drive them back to your website. 

At the bottom of the content, we've made the categorization more uniform so that 'topic', 'location' and 'tags' are much (MUCH) easier to read than they were before hopefully allowing people to more easily follow a path to additional content. You also have the ability down below to suggest a post for feature, bookmark a post, or re-blog a post (assuming you are logged in for each of those).

 

Comments

Comments have had a pretty major overhaul as well. We're certainly not finished with making the comments more interactive, but this is a start toward that. 

The most recent comments will be the first thing you see when you scroll to the comment section at the bottom of a post. At the top of that area, where the comments begin, you can easily expand the comments to see all comments by clicking the 'show all comments' link. In the orange comments bar, you can immediately add your own comment at any time without having to scroll all the way to the comment box at the very bottom. Just click 'new comment' in that orange box and the ability to comment will materialize on the page.

This first image shows what the top of the new comment area looks like

This makes it way easier to respond to comments wthout having to scroll up the page to see what someone wrote, then scroll down to the comment box to leave your response. But don't worry, you can still do it the old way as well since the comment box does live at the very bottom of the last comment as well.

Here is what the expanded 'new comment' area will look like once you click 'new comment'. Again, it allows me to scroll down through all comments while always having the ability to leave my own comment without having to scroll all the way down. Confused? You'll see what I mean when you give it a whirl.

As I said, this is a first step to a more interactive comment area. Expect threaded comments and the ability to tag folks in your comment in the coming months.

My AR Blog Page

This is the page for your top level blog. It used to be that someone landing on this page saw almost the exact same thing as if they landed on your most recent post. We wanted to make it more obvious that this page was unique and make it easier for someone to see more of your content at a quick glance. Now, upon landing on this page, you will still see the same right hand rail as on the new blog post page. However, on the left hand side of the page you will see your 'blog description (text)' from your blog settings page. This is essentially a way for you to share with someone what they can expect to find as they read your blog.

Below that, is a clear path to your ten most recent posts with the title and a snippet from each post. If you are logged in, you can easily access your draft posts on this page as well in the orange bar near the top of the page. 

 

As you can see, titles are massively important to get people to dive into your content from this new blog page. We put a lot of emphasis on them, just as you should when you are writing your blog posts. 

SEO

For me, this is the most exciting stuff.

(But it doesn't really lend itself to a picture as this stuff mostly happens behind the scenes)

In order to stay relevant, it is a constant battle to keep up with changes as Google leads the way in determining how they are going to rank content and what factors they are going to look at. As part of this release, we have incorporated a set of HTML mark up tags based on Schema.Org.

Schema.Org is a (well, from their website.....) "A shared markup vocabulary (which) makes it easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts"

Schema, of course, from your college freshman psych class (you all remember that class, right?), means an organized pattern of thought or behavior. Essentially what we are doing is telling search engines specific things about specific pages. Whereas before we left it up to them to essentially determine what was on the page and how each piece was relevant to the other pieces, we now use a Schema to give the search engine an organized understanding of what's on the page and also how it relates to other pages on the site.

The visual changes designed to give people easier access to your content is also an SEO play. The more easily we can get people from one page to another, the more time they spend on the site, the lower the bounce rate, the more the search engines like us. One thing that you may notice to this end if you ever visit ActiveRain while not logged in, is a little pop up that will appear in the bottom right hand corner of someone's screen after reading for a little bit of time on your blog post. That prompt will lead them from your individual blog post page over to your blog page to 'see more posts about real estate'. The idea here is to lead them to more of your content and give them an easier way to find other posts you've written. (You can see an example of the pop up here)

Moving Forward

Now that we have what I believe to be the most important page on the site redesigned, we can begin to focus on bringing some upgraded functionality to the site. Through this redesign effort, as well as previous launches, we have put in place the foundation on which to build. We are by no means done. We have a very aggressive plan for 2014 and we are really excited to push ActiveRain as close to the cutting edge as possible. Please, we would love your feedback, both positive and constructive.

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Keep Up In the Rain!