As you’ve noticed, I remodeled the look of this website, ArizonaRealEstateNotebook.com. It looks a lot better but one huge improvement is how it looks on smartphones and tablets.

My model for the remodel was Medium.com. It’s a beautiful website that’s gotten a lot of buzz about its simple design that puts the focus on words and reading.

So for Arizona Real Estate Notebook, I’ve removed the sidebar from all pages except the homepage so you can focus your attention on reading the posts. The interior pages have large fonts and images and minimal distractions.

I loved the old header photo of Paradise Valley shot from Camelhead but it pushed a lot of text down “below the fold” so I decided to removed it to emphasize the text, the stories.

My goal is to make Arizona Real Estate Notebook an enjoyable place for reading.

Mobile Breakthrough

On mobile, Arizona Real Estate Notebook used to look terrible! Now it looks great! Honestly. It’s actually readable on a phone!

Despite how terrible it used to look, one-third of all visits to ArizonaRealEstateNotebook.com were from smartphones and tablets so after this new mobile-friendly redesign I expect that mobile views will increase.

Takeaway

While I’m happy with how the remodel looks on desktops and laptops, I’m thrilled with how it now looks on mobile.

Let me know in the comments when you find problems or quirks in the new design. I’m sure there’s a few. I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

-John

P.S. You’ll see I also crafted a red text-based logo instead of just using text. The first draft of the logo used a dark blue color which look fabulous but made me feel uncomfortable for some reason. Eventually I realized the dark blue logo looked a bit like the UofA logo. Well, that explained the weird vibes! I changed the color to something close to maroon.