Enhancing the Exitround Blog’s valuation

We're excited to have worked with the team at Exitround on their website and blog. Knowing we were WordPress experts, Jacob approached Crowd Favorite looking for a little bit of assistance with the blog. He wanted help creating a great reading experience as Exitround started to focus on publishing more original content.

We proposed a number of changes to make sharing easier, commenting simpler, and create an improved visual impression for new visitors. These improvements included:

Social improvements included:

• adding the Social plugin to make broadcasting to social networks easy and, more importantly, to pull in comments about the posts happening on social networks like Facebook and Twitter
• adding attractive author biographies at the top of the page to help spotlight guest contributors, their backgrounds and their experience
• introducing the ability for the Exitround team to hand-pick "featured" posts to appear at the top of the home page (very much like in the FavePersonal WordPress theme)
• creating a dead-simple connect/subscribe widget to help visitors get the latest updates from the blog
• leveraging the JetPack plugin to add social sharing to posts and Twitter's "tweet button" to add a one-click feature to tip Techmeme about a story
• leading an internal 'design review' meeting with our entire design and front-end development team
• identifying, reviewing and then implementing a number of fairly simple style improvements to help with layout, spacing, consistency, typography, and much more

Design improvements included:

• adding a section where featured posts could draw more interest
• spacing adjustments throughout to make the layout more breathable
• font size and leading tweaks to optimize readability
• including the Exitround green to draw more attention to the navigation bar and featured posts

Overall, this process improved not just the blog's look, feel, and functionality, but also the entirety of the website's design vocabulary and appeal.