The new Living Room Diaries website design is now up and live! *YaY!!!* I used the sites logo of the red couch with the bass in front of it as the jumping off point for the design of the site. Pulling from this, I made the site colours red, black, gray and white. I also designed a underlying background image so that the content isnt on a stark white background, and also to add a bit of that “sexy comfy couch” feel to the site.

The CSS sliding menu adds a bit of flair to the site, with a glossy web 2.0 feel, and it also doubles as a page header since the page you are on is the highlighted menu item. On the main page, there is room for sponsor information, as well as reciprocal linking. On the Show Archive page, I used a sleek and shiny video player to showcase all of the previous shows, which also show a thumbnail of the show guest and some basic information about the episode.

I installed a WordPress blog into the site and redesigned it for flawless integration into the rest of the site. I also installed and modified a Simple Machines Forum to blend in with the site design, and encourage viewer participation so that they may talk about the episodes and show guests. SEO is very important to Kirk, so I made sure to take advantage of meta-tagging. Also, WordPress is an excellent SEO building tool that he will now be able to take advantage of to raise his site rankings.

Here are the before and after photos of LivingRoomDiaries.com…Enjoy!

Before

After - The New Living Room Diaries