When Offbeat Bride was first designed in 2006, it was structured as a book promotional blog. As we all now know, the site has evolved into something quite different over the past 3+ years, and so I decided it was finally time to overhaul the site's design in a way that better fit what it has become.
Now with a new look!
Ok, so the first thing you notice is obviously ... IT LOOKS DIFFERENT! Shout out to my designer Iris for making the magic happen. While I wanted to keep the same noir feel to the site, we did some major tweaking with things. It should feel pretty familiar in terms of where things are, but we made it more clear what was what. For instance, the "Advice" tab on the old site has always been just a link to the archive of Advice blog posts, and now it's clear which of the tabs are blog post filters — from the BLOG tab, you can view posts by Advice, Wedding Porn, Vendors (which includes shopping posts), and DIY (ooh, new category!), and Local. And ooh: how sexy is that featured post module at the top of the homepage? I'll be using it to feature the best of OBB, past and present.
Now with more category common sense
In an effort to make it a bit easier to find content that you like, we've done some cleaning up in the categories — we've broken Wedding Porn out into Decor, Fashion, Favors, Flowers, Food, Venues, and Invitations.
We've also broken Real offbeat weddings out into regions: Western, Midwest, Northeast, and Southern US; and then Canada and Global.
Oh and we added an icon for each category, so at a glance you can get a feel for what's what.
Now with comments that actually work
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I recently wrote about ditching IntenseDebate Comments, the system I'd been using for Offbeat Bride comments. Now that we're back to WordPress comments, things, well, actually work. You can still sign up to get notified of comments by email, and now everyone can edit their comments! We'll be adding more commenting features in coming weeks — stuff like Facebook Connect so you can comment using your Facebook account, and Report Comments so that you can tell us when you see something spammy, bitchy, or otherwise shady.
Now with more SQUEE! ...and a few bugs
I encourage y'all to click around and get a feel for all the new awesomeness. As you do so, I'm sure you'll find little things that are, uh, less than awesome ... as in slightly broken. We're probably going to be cleaning up on Aisle Offbeat Bride for a couple weeks, so please do let me know if you see something wonky. Redesigning a site with over three years of archived content makes for some major challenges, and while we've tried to catch most of the bugs, I'm sure we missed some.
But mostly — YAYAYAYAY! You're looking at months of hard work, and I'm so excited to finally be able to share it with y'all!
Oh, and one last thing: if you're thinking to yourself, ZOMG I HATE IT, give it a week to settle in. (We're still working on stuff!) If you still hate it, then let us know what's bothering you.
UPDATE
Thanks to everyone for all your feedback! It means a ton to me that y'all feel so passionately about the site that you're willing to take the time to share your thoughts with me! Ultimately, of course, the site's redesign is not going to be to everyone's liking, but we're working to integrate some of the suggestions y'all provided.
About Ariel Meadow Stallings
Author of Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides, Ariel acts as the publisher of all the Offbeat Empire websites. She lives, loves, and dorks out hard in Seattle, WA.
Brittany101 said
I haven't gotten to the rest of the site, because I kind of got stuck on the slideshow at the top. My work laptop (which I'm stuck on at home because my MacBook Pro is ailing) is 1024×768, and none of the new posts are above the fold, which can be a little overwhelming. It would be nice to be able to hide or condense that. Hopefully I'll enjoy it more on my bigass monitor at work, or when I get my shiny personal laptop back…
irisira said
It's growing on me. The layout of which posts are newest is a little trippy, but after seeing it a few times I understand how the layout works and can navigate it.
I LOVE that you can subscribe to comments. I think that's my favorite feature.
Ariel said
YAY! Glad to hear it's growing on you.
Subscribing to comments was something that our old comment system allowed you to do too, but it was impossible to figure out how, which meant no one ever did. I love how easy the new system is. 
Sarah said
So I waited a week, and here are my general comments about what I think could be different, although in general it's growing on me:
-font size, spacing, and space usage: in all, the new site doesn't feel like it utilizes space as effectively; the font is HUGE, I think a little too huge. Also, the ads sidebar is bigger than it used to be, cramping the blogs section even more. This makes everything seem cramped and less welcoming. Can you make the central white part of the space wider?
-Homepage: there's a lot more going on on the home page now, which means it has to be better organized. I like the slideshow, but I would say that if you are having that, you shouldn't have a blog just below that, which I think is what you were going for with the tiled boxes. But as people have said, it's confusing for these to transition right back to regular blog teasers. Maybe consider having tiled boxes based on category rather than timing (i.e. newest in each of the categories, one box per category) and that's it on the front pages? Although this would overlap in purpose with the tabs at the top. Also, the page width and font size combined make the boxes way too cramped now. Otherwise, I would nix the tiled posts section and just have the blog posts, with slightly longer teasers.
-posts: another thing I miss on the posts is that you had the tags off to the side in the teaser. This was really great to get a sense of the flavor of the post before clicking on it. It was great that you changed the posts to have the tags so that they are at the top once you go to the post page. Although it's kind of nitpicky, I really think the tags are much more manageable to read and more aesthetically pleasing as a list on the side rather than a paragraph-looking blob at the top. I do see that I think you made the tags in smaller font now, and that's very helpful.
-holistically: while I'm sure that there's a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements that make the site easier to manage, etc., I really feel like this site looks so much less unique than the previous one. Maybe because I look at WordPress a lot, but it just looks right out of a WordPress template, between the font and the post style and the icons and the background. It looks nice, and over time I'm sure this element of it will become more personalized (i.e., custom icons you mentioned), but I guess here what I'm saying is that you guys had really great design skills in making the previous site *look* really great and unique, even if you now need a higher level of manageability.
Hope this is helpful and not too dramatic. I just think that it's important for the awesome substance of the site not to be obscured