Proudly Revealing The Latest DQYDJ Redesign

January 27th, 2019 by 
PK

We're so proud to announce the latest incarnation of Don't Quit Your Day Job.... By the time you read these words, our new design has been up for more than 24 hours and served content to over 10,000 people.

New DQYDJ Design in 2019
DQYDJ's new design (and hosting!) revealed

Executive Summary: Changes on DQYDJ

The stylistic changes on the DQYDJ front end are the most obvious change of the current redesign.

There is, however, much more going on behind the scenes. We:

Your feedback finally overcame inertia on those landing pages. Thanks for reaching out (read: complaining about timeliness) – those will be much easier to keep in shape in the new format.

Why Create a New Design Now?

I'll freely admit: I've been itching to redesign the site for the last 6 months or so.

Working the front lines of the Twilio Blog redesign this year got me thinking about refreshing DQYDJ's branding. Buttressing the argument, WordPress moved by default to a new block-based editor, Gutenberg.

(Twilio's Blog is on Wagtail, which features a block editor - I saw the light and am hooked.)

While the rush of Twilio's redesign and the adaptation to a new editor were excellent reasons to proceed... I still delayed.

It was only when our previous host was purchased by a large, national hosting company that the fire was really lit. It was time to move hosts... why not make things much more complicated by also redesigning the site?

(That's a rhetorical question!)

That purchase, plus the fact that this is DQYDJ's tenth year, broke the inertia.

It was time to open the text editor and get to work.

Evolution, not Revolution on DQYDJ

When you break things down, this was merely an evolutionary change for DQYDJ, not revolutionary.

In 2016, the year of our last redesign, I had just purchased DQYDJ.com (and made it the canonical domain). We sprung for the works - new logo, new color choices: really, a whole new visual language:

Past DQYDJ designs not including today... note the stark change in 2016.

And it was a great design!

Since we launched the last iteration, tons of things have happened on the web.

Organic search crawlers now judge mobile experience before desktop. Readability and experience are back in the limelight: bigger fonts, larger line spacing, and shorter paragraphs are all the rage. Page speed is now one of the most important ranking factors.

Enter this design.

As you can see from the past designs GIF, we took another step closer to a minimalist design. As is in vogue, we threw out design elements that didn't give us – and our mobile users – joy. It also meant we kept a ton: logo, landers, sidebar content, and organization.

Most importantly, we doubled down on why you come: the content.

The new DQYDJ increases the font size, increases the line height, and features a more readable line width. We let the prose breathe, while optimizing for density in images and charts and tables (and calculators).

Oh, and we focused our efforts on the landing pages (just look at the header links!).

Thank You for Being a Reader

We – and I – don't get the chance to thank you folks enough for being readers. Seriously: thank you.

To that end, I've finally written up the story I've told so many times one-on-one in the new About Page. The site started (almost) as a joke: Don't Quit Your Day Job... – directed inward.

We're coming up on our tenth anniversary at the end of May.

It's been an unbelievable ride and I, frankly, can't believe I've spent a majority of my adulthood editing and writing for a website with this incredible audience and terrible acronym. You readers are why I dutifully keep this site going. You're why Cameron and I grind out content even when our lives take a turn for the busy.

Here's to a happy and healthy 2019, many new calculators and fresh research, and new features and content we can't even dream of today.

Happy tenth year of DQYDJ. Here's to the next decade.

      

PK

PK started DQYDJ in 2009 to research and discuss finance and investing and help answer financial questions. He's expanded DQYDJ to build visualizations, calculators, and interactive tools.

PK lives in New Hampshire with his wife, kids, and dog.

Don't Quit Your Day Job...

DQYDJ may be compensated by our partners if you make purchases through links. See our disclosures page. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
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