It will pass. Someday someone will get mad at me if I change something about this design too – but they are safe for at least a year.

But I would avoid ever changing it again. The slightly rough appearance of the previous blog was part of your branding. “Personality” if you like. That has disappeared completely – like entirely removing an old familar pathway to a family home, plus replacing the porch and the front door as well with all its old memories and quirks.

Right now this blog looks stone cold unfamilar. But familiarity will build and return Jack for one good reason — your personality is behind it. And so it will be as popular as before after a while.

I guess that is the cost of upgrading.

My own blog is about to appear, so I’m being very careful about the issues you mention such as making it good for SEO, but setting it up right from scratch so that I don’t have to change the look and feel.

Hope this is useful / reassuring.

Jonathan

Jonathans last blog post..JonathanGunson: Heh. Call me sentimental, but I love this #validation: http://tinyurl.com/5rzhnp

What I don’t like is it seems visitor behavior has changed a bit in regards to commenting! Its too early to tell definitively, but comments are down.

Google traffic is up. That, too, is too early to say definitively what the cause is, but I did get this theme for the SEO benefits over all. I can say that on the backend, the code is hyper clean and way better for SEO than the old theme.

I think it’s just a settling in period. People have to get used to the new navigation, etc. after they figure out if they are even in the right place or not, lol.

I like your old theme better. Then again, maybe I was just more familiar with it. What made you decide to change it up? Do you feel this one is visually better?

Better yet….are you tracking your visitors behavior before & after the theme change?

Jason Andersons last blog post..Free SEO Software And How To Use It