Excitement #1: The Redesign
Since the end of September, I've been working with a brilliant web designer named Ralph on redesigning my site. Ralph responded to my "Redesign" post telling me that he and his wife were big fans and that he'd had a lot of experience and could really help me organize things better. And that, clearly, he has. I'm in love with this redesign and let me tell you some of its features:- The thing I'm loving the most, right off the bat, is the rotating banner. That's right: we have three banners in rotation with the possibility of adding more. It was my idea to stab the duck (sorry vegetarians); and I have to give credit for the flying bagels to Kirk and the flying fish to my brother. Maybe somewhere along the line we'll add more, but for now you should reload the site a few times so you can see them all and bask in their glory.- Since it's the request I get most often, we added a search feature to the upper right of the site. Unfortunately, since I was dropped from Google we're using Yahoo's less reliable output. But for now it should help you navigate my archives and find results for things like "lemon" and "pudding" or "lemon pudding." [I've never made lemon pudding so don't really search for that.]- Graphically speaking, the colors are brighter and there are little icons on all the sidebar categories. They're so adorable I want to pinch their cheeks. The fonts, too, are cleaner and more soothing to the eye. Ahhhh, aren't you relaxed?- The organization of the sidebars makes lots more sense. Now you get my five favorite movies and songs with the option of clicking for more. The links on the left are internal links and the links on the right are external links (taking you away from the site).- Perhaps the best thing, in terms of scanning my past, is the way Ralph made it so my archive categories won't crash your computer. If you click Eating New York, for example, you'll get taken to a page where you'll see all my New York restaurant review titles and the first paragraph, but no browser-crashing pictures. Same for all the other categories.Overall, it's just thrilling to have something so familiar look so fresh and alive. I didn't want to ruin the good stuff we already had going on but I didn't want to cling to the past either. So I owe Ralph a huge thank you for his amazing work in making that happen. Thanks Ralph! I feel like a born-again blogger.
