If you haven’t heard of John Chow then you should go on and head over there and have a look at his blog. He will show you how to make money on the internet, something which I’m also slowly but surely doing, along with making you really hungry with his close up shots of all the food he eats.

Now I am a full-time web designer freelancer and I’ve always thought of different ways of how I would imagine a certain website or blog and what I would have done differently. So I decided to do a little redesign of John’s blog just to see what I would come up with.

As his blog has grown I think it’s time John outgrew a borrowed wordpress theme and adopted one that is professionally designed. I like to think I do a pretty decent job at web layouts, so far no complaints from any of my clients.

I tried to stick with most of the original layout as he has a lot of repeat visitors and sometimes a completely radical new design can totally put new visitors out of sync impacting his ROI on Adsense, Affiliate links and the Links that he sells on his page. So I’ve stuck with the same layout of the content on the left and single sidebar on the right. So far it has worked for him, with a new look hopefully it will be even better.

The header was always my main peeve he seems to like cars but I think if he gives himself a more corporate look with a nicer font, his slogan of “The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul” might fit the part more. So I took away the car image and just have the text along with a new iconic logo with his initials and a “.com”. The feed readers, subscription and add to technorati favorite buttons were shifted to the top. There is still a car image though just somewhere else.

The main page links still remain at the top just with a different color and rounded corners. With a few more changes the template looks better than what it did at least that’s what I think…images after the jump.

Here’s a screenshot of what his site looks like now, click for a larger view (opens in new window)

My version of what John Chow.com should look like. Now I’m not saying that this is the final result with a few more tweaks in design and image placement it can look even better, a bit more web 2.0′ish.

What do you think?

John if you’re reading this, hire me!

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.