By Kat French This week we launched our massive redesign of Social Media Explorer. Making dramatic changes to such a popular website was a daunting task to say the least. Because we have so much respect for what Social Media Explorer means to our audience, we took our time with a planning process spanning many months.
So why did we tackle this project in the first place? Well let’s just say we kind of care about our followers… a lot.
You deserved a simpler user experience
Our primary goal was to improve navigation and user experience for our audience. This new layout has received outstanding feedback on our agency site for a while now, so we knew it would be an improvement for our blog readers, too.
You deserved a more modern design
Our previous design was eight years old. It didn’t perform to our standards for mobile or search. We needed to make sure you’d have a great experience however you reached our website. We also needed to ensure that you could find our great content on Google without having to dig through a pile of outdated links. This design is intended to give new users a chance to experience as much of our content as possible. The sleek condensed approach is optimized for sharing our articles in a streamlined and accessible format. We hope that this will ultimately make it easier to navigate our site and understand what we’re about right from the get go.
You deserved clarity and transparency
Even after three years, we were surprised to find people were still unsure about the relationship between Social Media Explorer and SME Digital. The new design gives us a cohesive brand, and makes it explicitly clear that Social Media Explorer and SME Digital belong to the same organization. Having a connection between brand and blog is extremely important and we implore other agencies running a blog to take a step back and decide if they need to do the same. Readers want to know the story and humans behind your blog.
We hope the new design achieves all these goals. The only way we can know for sure is for you to tell us. If you have a minute, we invite you to give us your opinion of the changes in this survey. We want Social Media Explorer to be your straight-talk source for ideas and inspiration. The only way we can make this site perfect is with the help of our amazing followers like you.
We still believe there’s still a lot of ground to cover and new territory to explore in social media. Thanks for joining us on this exciting journey.
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Digital Editor