Blog to Business

It’s been many years since I launched Ordered List as my personal website and blog. And at the beginning of this year I used the Ordered List name to start my own web company. Since that time, I’ve wanted to shift the focus of the front side of the site to highlight the business.

I’ve also been wanting to redesign the site to bring a little more visual maturity, while keeping many of the same design elements that I love about the existing site. The result is the sixth incarnation of Ordered List. I’ve cleaned the navigation, added a Tumble Log via Tumblr, and cleaned up a few older articles. In general, a new skin, and some much needed maintenance.

While the paint is still wet, please let me know if you come across any issues. It’s always difficult designing for yourself, and it’s taken quite some time and many, many mockups to find something that I liked. So here we are. I hope you enjoy the new style.

65 Comments

  • Dan Rubin

    Congrats on the slick new design! Definitely more mature, it’s about time you grew up ;)

  • Joshua Bryant

    Looks fantastic, congrats on the design. I love the subtle use of texture everywhere!

  • William Wilkinson

    Looks excellent! Love it!

  • Luke Seeley

    Not a huge fan of the colours, but I love the added textures.

    The home page is much cleaner and thankfully showcases your portfolio more than your blog, which wasn’t being updated enough to warrant a front-and-center spot on the home page before.

    I really like the new navigation too.

  • Chris Papadopoulos

    The colors used makes the site feel pretty comfortable. Overall I think its very nice with a few neat layout ideas.

  • Glenn Wolsey

    Looks excellent Steve. I’d love to see another new t-shirt with a sightly changed colour scheme, I love my Ordered List shirt (wearing it at the moment). I’d be first in the line to purchase a new one!

    Great job on the refresh.

  • Steve Smith

    Dan: Thanks mom.

    Luke: The colors took some getting used to by me as well, but now I’m really enjoying them. And spot on about the portfolio and blog.

    Joshua, William and Chris: Thanks much.

  • Steve Smith

    Glen: Next time I order, I will. And thanks!

  • Paul Robinson

    Beautiful design. Like a book cover that you can’t put down. The live preview in comments is sweet too!

  • Jina Bolton

    At first, I thought “why did he not change the logo to match the color scheme?” and then realized that it was probably cached — I did a shift+refresh and sure enough, it was. ;)

    Anyway, I really like this a lot. It looks great! :)

  • Dean Robinson

    Very nice work as usual Steve, although the colours are all new and the homepage it restructure the site still has the same easy to navigate feel. Top work. (are you taking bets as to how long it takes for someone to steal this design…)

    Note: although I do have a brother Paul…thats not him who posted the previous comment, just a weird coincidence I guess.

  • Bryan Veloso

    Like I said before. It’s more mature, and I love how you got the idea for the color scheme from your office. But I can’t help but think that the dotted lines around every box give me the vision of you cross-stitching. XD

  • Ben Henschel

    Awesome redesign Steve, its got a rugged, outback, wearing some old jeans (but in a good way old) feel to it. I really like it.

  • Eli Horne

    When I saw your twitter about redesigning, I was asking myself “how could he possibly improve on this last design?”

    And then I saw this. Outstanding work. As always.

  • Alex Suraci

    Very nice, reminds me of a strange pair of jeans.

  • Jeremy

    Hey Steve, I really like this new version. I especially like how you start off each entry with your wrp excerpt. That is really nice! I will surely use hat as a good example of writing effective summaries for posts. I am very interested to watch how that will affect your writing style.

    Otherwise, very clean! Very nice!

  • Carl H

    The new layout looks great, with the exception of the color palette. The previous color scheme was much better.

  • Ronnie

    I like the way u differentiate your posts, the tumble logs and articles. jots down notes for his own revamp and the comment preview is way cool! Very nicely done indeed.

  • Lea

    Superb. I really like your border styles as well as the subtle textures. :-)

  • Biscuitrat

    Beautiful and sophisticated! I love the olives and browns :D

  • Shawn Grimes

    Everything looks great Steve. I really dig the color scheme and the subtle textures that you have used through out the site. The live preview system is great as well. Is that something you wrote yourself? Either way the attention to detail in this iteration is fantastic. Job well done.

  • Joseph Lochli

    Very nice site. I just love the colors! As said by Biscuitrat, very sophisticated. Although my Ordered List tee doesn’t match the current colors now! Will there be an updated shirt (and maybe a discount for those who already bought it)?

  • Christian Machmeier

    Congratulations, you’ve done an awesome job, that’s a fantastic redesign!
    The new colors match together pretty nicely, you really have a great taste of style. Your portfolio gets a lot more attention, since the focus of the site shifted away from the blog. Although it’s still not a “corporate website”, I like the matured style very much. Issues? None, on the first look ‘n’ try.
    I’m currently not wearing my ‘ordered list’-shirt, since it’s dryin’ outside, but I’m absolutely looking forward to the new one (you may regard this as an order). Keep it up!

  • Samuel Faith

    Great one, Steve! This is my first visit to your site and it’s fantastic! I will use Archive.org to look at your previous versions too.

  • Jim Gosz

    Steve … great job on the design. Colors and structure rock.

  • Jason Beaird

    Looks great Steve! Clean, but unique and the analous color scheme together with the border styles really give it character. The first thing I thought of when I saw the new design was BlueFlavor’s Leaflets site. It seems the humble noise filter is making a comeback in a big way. Cheers!

  • Jeff Mackey

    This latest redesign and refocus is awesome – looks great!

  • Paul

    I think the colors are a little drab, which I like on a personal level, because I wallow in depression, but I (know less than you about web design) don’t think it will appeal to as broad of an audience because of that. That’s just my $0.02.

  • Deaf Musician

    Looking sweeeeet! Just love the dotted border inside things. Great work, Steve!

  • Luke Visinoni

    I can’t decide if I like this layout better or not. At the moment, I’m still partial to the old layout, but this one is very nice as well. One thing I noticed is that you cannot tab through the form elements in this comment response form, which is kind of annoying. Other than that, excellent work!

  • Luke Visinoni

    Nevermind, my stupid tab key is just broken.

  • Brendan Falkowski

    I liked the green/blue and dark theme a lot, but this design seems more thoughtful and the information organized more logically. I fear earth tones so imagine my surprise.

  • Jeff Byrnes

    Sweet redesign. Keep up the killer work!

  • David Russell

    Truly fantastic! I love the colors and textures. And now I’m discovering a lot of the nifty functionality underneath. Cool!

  • Chris

    I am (sort of) a loyal reader, and started to wonder what happened to you after a few months of inactivity. Now I know! The layout is incredible because it’s clean, yet not too bare. I personally do not like dark earth tones, but the more I browse around your site, it definitely grows upon me.

    Great job, and keep up the good work!

  • Tomasz Gorski

    Awesome redesign Steve You made great work. I really like the new navigation. Regards

  • Elliott Cross

    Great new design! The colors are well blended and it looks really nice, simple and clean. Great inspiration as I get ready to redo my site and have a few designs I’ve been pondering for other sites as well.

  • Byron Rode

    Awesome redesign… Really loved the old site, and have used it for inspiration many times! Really like the colours and the color pallete. Browns are big at the moment!

  • Rex

    Hey Steve!
    Superb redesign or as u said sixth incarnation;)……..Keep up the amazing work u do. :)
    Adieu,

  • Shaal

    Though i am not sure how did it look previously but the design that i see now is really appealing and great looking, Best of luck with Business and happy blogging~

  • Adrian

    I love it. While the old design was nice, I much prefer the new look and you’ve definitely nailed your objectives. This design has an added professionalism about it, very nice.

  • Montoya

    This is a great design but I thought I should mention that the contrast is really horrid on my CRT at work. You should test it on one and see for yourself.

  • David Hopkins

    Just stumbled across your site. I really like your new design. The colours and typography work really well. I’ve not seem a blog lke this so it sticks out. On a persoanl note, the only thing I would change is I would use text instead of images for your menu.

  • skoutz

    Again, I’m the stupid friend that rarely understands what you are talking about, but as soon as I openned you page I said, “Ooo I like the new look.” So take that for what it is worth. I hope all of you are doing well. I miss you guys!

  • Zeb

    Excellent new design. I love it! and congratulations for starting the web design business.

  • Jonathan Solichin

    Nice redesign. Very original color scheme. I love this live comment preview I’m looking at. Mind sharing? The redesign reminds me of particle tree . Well good luck with your new business. Looking forward to more great design.
    BTW- With the link markup system, I can’t figure out how to add a period after the link without a space. Maybe its just me being ignorant.

  • ryan matteson

    http://corkingdesign.co.uk/
    “dont steal my stuff its bad karma” …is this the new catch phrase for designers?

  • instalacje pneumatyczne

    Great article !!! Thank You very much. Can I translate it to my website ?

  • Leevi Graham

    This is a really great web design. Information hierarchy is spot on. Although the brown is not my favourite colour it is used really well throughout the site. Oh the noise in the background of the comments/headers etc is a great touch, as is the javascript comment preview

  • Trevor

    Really like the way the site looks

  • Julian Schrader

    Very nice! I like the new design just like the old one, but you’re right, it’s more “mature” now.

    Go on, keep up with the good work — it’s really nice!

  • Alastor

    That is truly great and amazing — especially the comment preview is a very nice feature that I would like to see being implemented on all websites :)

  • Simon

    Uhh ahh I don’t like this colors. its something between loam and khaki, darkgreen and brown. Difficult to read the text. The bold introduction-text of this article is flickering.

  • MyMathGenius

    Seriously well made website. Excellent use of brown.

  • Lewis - Web Design

    I like the new design, but not as much as I loved the old one. Is that still online at all?

    Also, the live comment preview is cool, but it doesn’t change HTML entities so if I try and add a angled bracket it screws up a little.

  • Joram Oudenaarde

    A véry pleasant site to read and visit! I’ve been an occassional visitor of your site, and this new design is definately one of the sites that are (imho) very pleasing to the eyes. Congrats on your fresh design ;-)

  • Marcel

    I read a lot of your posts, but still miss the function to comment on older post, because I would like to ask, comment and add ideas. Would be very interesting to start talking about things that happend in the past.

  • Tippser

    I never thought that using brown could look so good :-) Like the new design.

  • Mr. Rürup

    Great job, really “ordered”. Well done.

  • Scott Lenger

    I really like the background texture, a breath of fresh air from all the shiny 2.0 copy cats running around. Also, my comments appeared in the comment box before I even hit the submit button, …magic.

  • CognitiveCombine

    Beautiful! I liked your old design too, but this is truly a work of design art. Great interplay of colours, nice layout. I’m impressed :)

  • Angielski

    Nice and well made website. Excellent use of brown colour.

  • Terry Apodaca

    Great new site design! I’ve got a design with very similar colors and most have loved it! Now I have a reference to someone else.

  • John Lampard

    Fantastic design! I also love the dynamic comment box you have here, and seeing my comment appear in real time as I type it :)

  • Angelo

    One of the best live comment previews i’ve ever seen. Nice touch asynchronously fetching and inserting the gravatar.