Over the last month, The LexBlog design and dev team have been working on a redesign for LexBlog.com article pages. I find the best way to start a redesign is to ignore the home page or other landing pages (which will be updated soon). And focus on a text-heavy article page that receives the bulk of page views.
The article page template was low-hanging fruit for improvement. Plus, it will provide the necessary design elements that we can then turn around and apply to other pages on the site. The New design has a more reader-friendly publication feel. Here are a few of the significant changes:
- Updated headline font that provides a more distinguished and personal feel to each article
- The central featured image just below the headline adds visual intrigue.
- Updated body copy font that is larger and easier to read
- Post meta is now better organized below the article
- Featured image fits edge to edge on mobile browsers
One side benefit of this process was the discovery of some great tools for testing the new fonts and article layout on different devices to ensure our pages looked great on a desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Apple’s Xcode was one such application that I found extremely beneficial. An integrated development environment for macOS. This suite of tools has a nifty device simulator that enables me to view a virtual iPhone and then edit the code using the Safari web inspector.
These changes are exciting as I see a website that is more aligned with our goals of connecting legal professionals to people for good. The changes will not stop here. We will be reworking each page type on LexBlog.com until we are delighted with how they look and function for our readers and publishers.