Kidzstuff website design revised October 2nd 2008

Posted October 4th, 2008 in Case Studies

I have a website directory for children's oriented websites in New Zealand at www.kidzstuff.co.nz which I set up 18 months ago after purchasing the expired domain which had some decent inbound links. This post has a brief overview of the site and the design changes I made a couple of days ago.

After purchasing the expired domain, I set the site up very quickly, using the old website's existing directory which I downloaded using a PHP spider I created. I had the intention of updating all the existing listings, adding new listings and content to make it a useful portal but never found the time to do it.

The Google Adsense ads on the website pay pretty well on an eCPM basis so I have decided it's finally time to do something about this directory. I should easily be able to increase the traffic from the meagre 90 or so visitors it gets a day at present to something much more significant and make more money from Adsense and ultimately from selling adspace to NZ advertisers.

The first step was to do a quick redesign, because I never really liked my original "design". Here's a screenshot of what it looked like prior to my new design going live a couple of days ago:

It was fixed width and left aligned and very very white. A little while back I signed up to Dream Templates which gives you unlimited access to 1000s of website templates (as well as Flash, Word and PowerPoint templates), so I used one of those templates and significantly modified it to create the new design. I'm no designer and although it's still a very simple design I couldn't have done it without the Dream Template.

The new design is still fixed width but is now centered and has a much brighter background, including a sunburst effect in the background at the top of the page. The rest of the content is the same as it was before.

I still need to do work to the backend of the site and start editing the existing listings and creating new ones, but now I have a nicer design to work with I'll feel better about doing work on this. I'll update on progress of this site as I get to work on it.

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