As you might have noticed – I took a week off from blogging in order to focus on something else – cleaning up Jappler.com. Over the past few months I have learned so much more about WordPress, web site optimization, and what I really used this web site for – so I decided I needed to take some time to redo this site.
From a design perspective, I decided to darken the colors quite a bit in order to remove some of the drabness of the old design. I also added a background pattern to give some depth, and also added in some new pictures in the header that represent changes/additions in my life over the last few years. I love working with greys – so I added more grey elements. I also simplified the layout and got rid of a number of image based elements to keep everything minimal.
From a UI perspective, I decided to focus on the content I have created over the past 4-5 years instead of a few static pages here and there. I moved all of the blog content into the main navigation so it is easier to find/navigate. I also used Jappler Menus in combination with the WordPress function to list all categories/sub-categories.
From a functional perspective, I started from scratch with this new version. I created a number of custom functions that make presenting content a lot easier. I dropped the YUI library and went with all jQuery based AJAX functionality. The code is leaner, faster, and easy to modify for any future needs. The comments are now using WordPress’s threaded comment functionality, and a number of other WordPress 2.7 additions. I also went through and got rid of almost 50% of my old plugins (replaced the functionality with custom functions, WordPress built in functionality – or completely removed unused plugins.
From an optimization perspective, this site uses far less javascript, CSS, and images and will load much faster than the previous site. I also increased the use of title tags, alt tags, and other easy tricks to help with search engine optimization.
All in all – this was something fun that I enjoyed and look forward to adding even more new design/functional elements in the future.
Doug
Definitely your best yet Jen. Way to go! One thing that I noticed, when I came directly to this post via the ‘read more…’ link in my RSS reader (now that i look at it when you are in any individual post) the nav bar indicates your current location as ‘home’. Since no of the nav items relate to an individual post – maybe it should be ‘blog’? Anyhow – the menus are awesome.
Jennifer Zelazny
Thanks – I made the change (added some additional logic). I am glad you like it!
Mom
Nice job, Jen! You do great work!
Jennifer Zelazny
Thanks 😉