The new site design was officially launched unceremoniously yesterday at 4:03pm. I decided not to make any announcements simply because the design elements didn’t add or remove any user functionality and therefore appeared normally to all visitors before and after the changed with the exception of the visual changes.

What changed?

Everything! The overall layout has changed and among a large amount of small changes, notable ones include:

• Google AdSense – Ads removed from right sidebar and placed above the page to the right of the logo. This allows the ads to appear on every post and page, which was not previously done before as the sidebars changed contents as needed by each post/page layout.
• Social network icons – The icons in the upper right corner of the site were made larger and clearer as to what function they serve.
• Homepage Featured posts – The 5-post featured slider on the homepage was removed and has currently NOT been replaced by anything similar. A new featured slider will appear above the list of recent posts soon, but will not feature posts from the Featured category. Instead, they will focus on posts of heightened popularity.
• Ledfrog logo – For the first time in 11 years, the Ledfrog.com logo has dropped the .com. This was done to reduce the length of the logo so as not to run into the new advertisement space. It was also decided that the .com should only appear when the logo is not already on Ledfrog.com (as in advertising and marketing usage).

All in all, I feel that this design change not only streamlines the look and feel I’m trying to express, but it makes things a bit more organized. Ultimately, some of the new features will enable me to enhance the user experience even further in the future.