Pages Navigation

Last time, I talked about blog content organization, and I mentioned the pages bar, briefly.

To recap, I'm making a few pages, you know, those essentials that aren't quite blog content, but still essential or expected. I'm talking About and Contact, Buttons page and Parties and Features page that I decided to present as pages to free up some valuable sidebar real estate. They are nice to have, but can be quite cluttersome, so having them out of the way at the top and bottom as individual pages seemed like a smart move. I'm really hoping they will be easy to locate, especially the button page since it's less common to have them as a page, but not unseen. Well ok, I'm really still on the fence about the buttons page. It wouldn't take that much space in the sidebar section, but at the same time how many people actually use the button? TBC...

Quite a bit more unconventional is seeing a resource page and an archive/sitemap page, but I wanted to create them. The resource page because I want to give credit to the wonderful (mostly) free digital art I use around the blog; we're talking fonts, shapes, tags, doodles, paintbrushes, etc. The Sitemap I'm still a little on the fence about it, I love sitemaps for Wordpress blogs, gives an other way for people to find your content the way they want to find it (archived in chronological order, or by label/category), and includes ALL your content. Every single page.

Those are the 6 pages I'm planning. Sometimes you also see a Home tab with them, but I find that redundant seeing as the header or logo should point to the home page of a blog, or website. I really hope it doesn't confuse people, and I'll see if I need to add it later, but really the more I think of it, the more I think it's just convention for it to do that, so I don't see there being a big problem about this.

Not everyone separates their pages tabs from their content navigation tabs, but the blogs and websites that do do that have really attracted me lately. Actually, a lot of them have the pages bar at almost the very top of the blog page, sometimes above the header/logo, and then the content navigation below it. That's what I decided to do, even if I don't have that many pages, or categorical navigation to showcase.


I'd also like to have simple text links of those pages in the footer section of the blog. Websites do it like that, and I think it's expected to have links to that kind of information at the bottom of a page, too. The footer is often under utilized and neglected, but really when someone gets to the bottom of your blog you don't want that to stop them from continuing finding more stuff to read, so it's really quite logical.

Wait til you see what I have up my sleeve for graphics and coding for these bars, I'm really excited about them!!

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Blog Content Organization: Navigation

Everybody's got their own way of organizing and displaying their content. Some do it well, some not so well (just a fact...). Nothing frustrates me more when I find a blog post I really enjoy than not being able to find more content to enjoy on that blog. Needless to say, I don't stay there very long.

So far, I've been trying to divide up the subject of blog content organization. It's such a huge portion of the blog, and quite multifaceted when you start thinking about it. And sometimes one doesn't realize just how much thought does, and should go into planning it well, because it's more "behind-the-scenes" stuff.

But here's what it really boils down to: can your readers find more posts to read on your blog? How easily can they find it? Is it intuitive? Is it well presented?

And here's a really big blog pet peeve of mine: I hate it when people slap on a label page for navigation in the navigation bar. Whether it be for a series or a category, it just looks awful and is so hard to navigate and find what you are looking for.

Here's what I expect from navigation, and you can very well disagree with me, but I think navigation should show you a glimpse of the content, as much of it as is relevant to know whether I want to read the post or not, without seeing the whole post and without having to click through pages and pages of archives to see more. And that's exactly what labels don't do.

A label is just a filter really, only displaying the posts with that label, and displaying all of the post. Unless you have truncated posts, which in that case can make it manageable to browse through as long as it's just a small snippet, labels are awful IMHO. And labels are already there in a widget type thing most of the time on a blog. If I wanted to view posts in this manner (which I personnaly don't) I would click on the particular label. When I click on a navigation menu, I expect to see a list of blog posts pertaining to that subject where I can CHOOSE which ones to read with ease. Also, it really helps not to have to load all the content, and pictures, you don't want to read.

That's my 2 cents on the matter, and that's how I'm choosing to display MY navigation, or well how NOT to display my navigation. Navigation takes work, and there just is no adequate shortcut for it. So at the very least, have a Project Gallery, and if you feel up to it, further separate and sort your content for easier navigation.

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm going to display my 3 main categories in the navigation bar upfront, one beside the other, then when you click on one it will open up, in a drop-down menu, the rest of the sub categories.

And here's where you need to consider touchscreens. There are no hover effects on touchscreens, so if you set your drop-down menu to open up on hover, it will not work on tablets and smartphones. I've recently come across this problem on my new tablet. It's a pain not being able to open up the drop-down menu. The only thing that makes it better is when at least it opens up a page where you can see the sub-categories and choose on. And again where labels DON'T work.

I need to look further into how to make a drop-down menu that opens when clicked; I'm sure it can be done.

I still think labels are a good idea, but they shouldn't be used instead of proper navigation. They should be their own separate navigation system. You often see them in the sidebar, which is where I'm probably gonna put them, but I'm also considering putting them in the footer section. I haven't decided yet. I'm working from the top down and I'm still in header mode.

An other thing is that I want to separate my navigation into 2: actual posts navigation bar (detailed above), and a pages navigation. I'm talking the About Page, the Contact page. Things that don't evolve over time (too much... ie static), that don't really lead to much content, but that are still quite essential and expected in a blog.

I've seen this done more and more on blogs and I find it very well presented, so I'm implementing it on my own blog.

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Blog Content Organization : Labels and Categories

Content organization is something you want to start thinking about early on in your blogging journey. The sooner you start, the easier it is to maintain, the more likely you are to get started and keep it going. No one wants to organize 100+ posts worth of content in one shot; ok maybe some people who love to organize (I started when I had about 40 posts because that's when I started to have enough stuff to organize into categories). If you want to just dab your toes in it to start, I recommend a Project Gallery type of page. You don't need to categorize yet, but all your projects are in one place and easy to navigate. But after a while, you'll want to start separating your content a bit more.

If you are on Wordpress, you're very lucky to have Categories and Labels. Oh how my organizer self would love that! But alas, I'm still on Blogger, so it's all one jumbled thing: Labels.

The way I use labels is I have category labels (craft, DIY, org, tips, blogging, personnal, and the like), sub-category labels(season/holiday craft, sewing, office org, kitchen org, food tips, tech tips, etc), material labels (paper crafts, wood crafts, paint crafts, etc), room labels (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom), and I think that's pretty much it for now. If at some point I see that there are a few posts that have something in common, I can easily just add a label to group them together.

Having them organized, or knowing how you want to organize them, is one part, the first line of defense if you will. The other part is knowing how to display that. I'm doing a navigation bar in the header section of the blog for sure, separate from the pages navigation. I'm probably gonna scatter some other organization in the sidebar and footer, but I haven't quite decided what will be where yet. One step at a time!

Blogger also provides a couple ways to display your organized content, Archives that organizes by date, and Labels that simply displays all your labels. That's probably what I'm going to use in the sidebar and/or footer. But honestly, not many people search with labels, which I'm not surprised, it can really be overwhelming!

Which is why I want to use the header navigation efficiently as the main way for readers to browse my content.

You can display whichever categories you want in the navigation bar, but personally less is more and I want it to be concise. I thought the best way to do it would be to have the big categories displayed outright, which then leads to the sub categories (either a drop-down menu or on the page that is linked). If I put the sub categories up there, then I think there would be too many and it would just be overwhelming; again personal preference, as I really love hierarchical categories (categories within categories, and so on...), it just makes sense in my mind.

But I'd prefer not to rearrange my whole hierarchy of categories and sub-categories every few months. This has been rather hard for me, coming up with categories that are broad enough, but also distinct and intuitive enough that someone else would be able to find what they are looking for.

I haven't yet decided if I'm just doing one single page (like the project gallery), and then those links in the navigation would be anchors to sections on that one page, or different pages for the main categories and then anchor links to the sub-categories sections. I just don't have too much content, but I'd like to plan for the future at the same time. Decisions, decisions.

Here's where I'm at so far: 3 main categories, with their sub-categories in parentheses:

1. Craft and DIY (seasonal and holiday crafts individually or together, sewing, crochetting, decor, wall art, built it)
2. Homemaking (organization, cleaning, recipes, tips for the home, green living, thoughts in general)
3. Technology (tips, blogging, apps, social media, etc)

Here's where I go back and forth. Do I split the main categories more? Crafts could be one, DIY an other, it's just hard sometimes to seperate the 2 (like my sunburst mirror, is it a craft or a DIY? it's definetely decor though). Basically, to me Crafts and DIY, covers everything handcrafted.

Then there's Green Living that could be an indivudual category, but I also think it fits well with the homemaking global category. This is more things you DO to make a home, rather than MAKE, you know? But there could be some overlap, say if I make reusable ziplock bags, which is sewing and green living, but I think that's ok, too. It's just because of my green series I did in October, I have a lot of green posts! Though they are mostly round-ups.

The Technology category is basically a main category because I didn't think it fits anywhere else, but it's still something that I like to cover, just not as heavy as the other categories. Technology just englobes everything we do, not just homemaking, hence why it's its own category.

I dunno. Some I'd like to take out of sub categories and make main categories, but they ARE sub-categories, and then if I make THEM main categories the other sub categories will feel unloved :( lol Am I putting too much thought into this? Probably...

TBC...

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Blog Content Organization: Project Gallery

Blog navigation, to me, is one of the most useful, and essential part of a blog. You want any readers coming to your blog to be able to find more stuff to read, which means more pageviews for you! So you have to help them find what they want, and more importantly, what they didn't even know they wanted!

At the beginning of your blog journey, you're gonna dab in a bit of this, and a bit of that. You may not know what your categories are, and you may not want to commit yourself right away. That's ok. I suggest you start a Project Gallery as soon as you can, though! You don't need to categorize, but as long as readers can easily find all your blog posts, that's what you want. Have a thumbnail of your most descriptive image, and your post title with it, that will suffice.

My Project Gallery was one of my 4 navigation buttons in my first blog design, and I think it really helped readers to find more content they might be interested in.



I've been using InLinkz Project Manager (formely Link Manager)(which is now unfortunately no longer free, but for 12$ a year I paid for it) to manage my Project Gallery. It does it all for me without me needing to code anything, just need to enter the information. Only thing is that I don't know how it will work with my responsive design, so I might need to change that out.

It doesn't matter how you do it, but as long as you have all your projects on one page, with a descriptive image and title, your readers will be happy. I say have both the image and title because I'm visual and I decide what I want to read most of the time based on the image, but sometimes I need to read the title to know what it's about, and sometimes it's the title not the image that intrigues me. Give your readers choices, not everyone browses the same way, and there's nothing wrong with that!

After some time blogging and x number of posts, you'll start seeing a pattern and categories will start to form themselves. That's when you want to further categorizes and sub categorize your posts. I'll talk about that next post.

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Choosing a Color Palette

I mentioned a while ago now that I wanted to write about choosing a color palette, but have been putting it off because I wanted to code more. Now I want to get it out of the way.

Now, all time I designed my blog I chose a scrapbook kit and that pretty much dictated what my color palette was going to be. This time around, all the elements I found that I liked were just plain overlays, doodles, etc that were just borders without a predefined color.

Also, maybe I didn't find a scrapbook kit I liked this time around because the color palette was off. Anyway, I had to choose my own colors to design with. Where to start??

I looked through Design Seeds to find a scheme I liked. I copy pasted the ones I liked into OneNote. I quickly realized that the other I liked were very colorful, and not shades of the same color, or couple of colors. Not surprising, I LOVE color. The more the better.

The thing was that I wasn't satisfied with any one image and color scheme. I wanted to mix and match. But that doesn't always fit together. I picked one image that I liked best and that I wanted to use the most of its colors, it was this one:



I started an image in photoshop a made circles of the colors. Then I went and found more images, that already had at least one of the colors I was looking for, and others that weren't in the first image, and copied their colors into the same photoshop major collage, as I'll call it. I must have used about 10 different images, and in the end I had this collage of colors:



Naturally, that was way too much! I had a hard time finding the right green and blue. So I picked the ones that were my favorite, then crossed out the colors that didn't match well, or were slightly off, and in the end I ended up with this smaller collage for a color scheme:



Still, 9 colors is a lot!! But there are 5 (or is it 6?) major colors, and some tones of the main/favorite 3. I plan to/have been doing my design mostly around the 3 main colors: the pink (my very favorite color in the scheme, thought it would be the orange, but no!), the blue, and the orangey yellow. The pruple and the green are more for when I want more colors instead of more tones (I'll use them when I need to make a list of similar elements, like the follows buttons). They are the colors that are featured prominently in the logo, which was the first piece of graphic design I made up, and what's setting this tone for the rest of the graphics.



I'm still debating whether I do a rough tutorial for how I made the header graphic. I played around with photoshop until I was happy, mostly, but maybe there are some tricks one might find helpful if they are doing their own graphic elements (FYI, I am not that great with photoshop, or graphic design...). At the same time, I don't want anyone copying my effect, so yeah... If you got any questions as to how I did it with photoshop (I think if you look at the graphic long enough you can see what I did) just ask in the comments :)

So with that, the theme I'm going for is: doodly, swirly, colorful, fun, whimsical. At first I thought I'd be outlining everything in black, but as I go along I find myself removing that aspect more and more- it's just too harsh. I'm still using it for some elements, but dulling the blackness down a bit, either by using a more charcoal color, or just simply decreasing the opacity of the black layer.

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Header Layout

When I started thinking about this new blog design, I knew I wanted to make better use of my header. The space above the fold is very precious real estate, it's the first bit of your blog a reader sees, it sets the tone and feel of a blog.

As much as I loved my old header, it was just an image, and it was not very useful in any other way. Ok, I did have a menu below it, that was useful, but that's it.

It's become more and more of a trend to put different elements right within the header, for ease of use to the reader. Social media icons, email subscription, search bar are all a common part of the header nowadays.

But I also find that everyone does it the same way. I wanted to incorporate more into the header, but make it different than what we're used to seeing on other blogs. I needed take it up a notch, and make it just a little more fun.

I also gave a lot of thought to how the various elements in the header would rearrange based on the screen size; for big screen PCs, tablets, and smartphones. I might just be really complicating things! We'll see. I've been putting off tackling the header because of this; I just don't know if and how it will work.

But enough procrastination, I had to start somewhere.

First things first, allow more gadgets into the header part of the blog layout. This tutorial will explain how to do that, and a little more. Easy peasy. Then you have to tweak the sizes and play with floats as you add new gadgets to make it go where you want it to.

What I decided to add to my header are the following: logo, pages menu, tagline, social media buttons (including follow buttons RSS and email), search bar, and navigation bar (for content, as oppose to the pages menu).

Don't get me started on knowing to do a pages/menu bar, vs/and a navigation bar. I've thought a LOT about how to organize the blog, and I might still change things around; I'll probably write about that at one point. Navigation and blog organization is a HUGE thing for me!! And it gets all the more trickier with responsive design.

So, after a lot of thinking, at non appropriate times... (it really gets all consuming this blog design thing!), I've come up with the following layout for the blog, at desktop resolution:



I know it's busy. But hopefully I will be able to make it really pretty, functional, and... flowy, for lack of a better term. There's gonna be lots of trial and error!!

Now that that's done, I gotta do the graphic elements for the different parts. I'm a real big fan of hover effects, but I'd like the hover effects to be achieved with CCS(3), so I don't have to have 2 different images, and so it saves on load times. I've got a lot of great ideas, especially from this article: . It. will. be. AWESOME! I'll also probably be using effects like opacity, background color (with transparent elements in the image so the background shows through), make an image bigger.

BUT, and this is the sad part, I recently realized that tablets won't be able to see all my cool hover effects. sniff sniff. I'll probably try out the :pressed pseudo class (pseudo element? can't remember which is which right now), at least there will be the hover effect for the split second someone touches the button on a touchscreen. And probably :active too. Same effect at active as hover and pressed. That is the plan!

Now the thing will be not to overdue it. I think there's gonna be a fine line, and I'll probably be walking RIGHT on it's edge. I REALLY LOVE hover effects!!

TBC...

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Choosing Media Breakpoints

One thing that has been nagging me in the back of my head and prevented me from moving forward is that I wasn't sure of the layouts I wanted to get for different media devices. I didn't know how many breakpoints I wanted, or where those breakpoints would be best situated.

Sure I've read of some in articles, they mostly reference the iPad and iPhone, and well, I'm kinda anti-Apple... So I didn't want to base myself on them but rather on actual resolutions.

So I took the time to look through my google analytics for my blog and see what people are viewing my webpage on. In my mind, I saw a total of 12 different possible breakpoints from all the data I analysed. Yes, that is a lot!! And I cannot create all of them, or well not all of them right away. I don't know if they will all even be necessary in the end, it will depend on where I go with the first ones. My goal might be to one day have the blog optimized for all those breakpoints (which seperates landscape and portrait in some cases).

I've read many an article saying to start responsive design at 320 and work your way up. Well, I don't have a smartphone, I cannot design for it right away, right off the bat. And besides, it's not the biggest chunk of my pageviews. It's still much more logical to start at a normal size screen. What is normal size? Well, it would seem between 1280 and 1439 px wide. Which is my work laptop. I'll make everything responsive so it'll pretty much fit any screen without a scroll bar in sight.

Then I'll go to smartphones, below 320, or maybe below 480 to start with, then redefine those later...

Then it'll be optimized for the iPad in portrait mode, or portrait below 1000, and above 480.

Then for big screen larger than 1920.

Then we'll see. Ideally these are all the breakpoints I could imagine myself doing (in size order):
1) <300 both landscape and portrait(cuz these are almost squares), but there are very few it would mostly be for older phones 2) >301 <479 portrait 3) >480 <599 portrait 4) >301 < 601 landscape (could be divided into 2 if I'd really want to, this would be the very last resort though) 5) >600 < 1000 portrait (tablets' most popular resolution) 6) >600 <1023 landscape 7) >1001 portrait (maximum size for portrait)
8) >1024 <1279 9) >1280 <1439 (most popular resolution and default one) 10) >1440 <1919 11) >1920

So yes, lots of work ahead of me!! If I choose it. I just really needed to know the grand plan to be able to devise how I want my header to rearrange, because it's gonna be the most complicated part to code I think. I've got such grand plans indeed for it! But the more I read, the more I realise not quite everything is possible here. Especially if I want it to be responsive. It would be easier if I just wanted it adaptative (pretty much fixed size but changes layout on breakpoints). I don't want to start working on the header layout just to realize something is not possible for the smallest viewport and have to recode everything.

It will be epic!

TBC...

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