Category Archives: Web Design

Pardon My Appearance

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One of the reasons I wanted to move my blogs to a self-hosted site was to have more flexibility in designing the look of the site and to learn a few things along the way. I tweaked the look of an existing template and more or less left it alone for a while. I recently began playing around with the look a bit more. A lot of those changes haven’t gone live yet, but a few have, like creating some white space around all the items in the sidebars. And I’ve been playing around with what I want in the sidebars on Being and Formulating.

My point being is that as I test different options, the look of the sites may look a bit funky (not necessarily in a good way) from time to time. If you are just reading the feed, then, of course, none of this matters.

New Media and Computer Services Web Site

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I have been working on some revisions of my department’s existing web site. This is not a full blown redesign. I just wanted to fix some issues with it and add some navigation specific to our department. I am on our libraries’ usability working group and we plan on testing the Media and Computer Services (MCS) sections of the larger site, so there will be more work ahead.

Currently, all the navigation is on the MCS homepage:

Old MCS navigation

Old MCS navigation

I have permission to alter the main left hand navigation of the site to tailor it to my subsection of the site, but I feel that would be bad form. That navigation should remain consistent throughout the site. So, I created a right hand navigation which is specific to MCS.

New MCS specific navigation

New MCS specific navigation

As of now, the libraries’ site has a fixed width, so adding the righ hand navigation makes things a little tight, but I think the benefits of the added navigation outweigh the narrowness of the main page. I looked at the UNLV site for examples of 2nd tier navigation and got the idea for my navigation from the right side navigation used on the subpages of our Office of Information Technology.

Example of an OIT subpage

Example of an OIT subpage

I also use a similar line across the top of the page to underline the page heading.

Using the side navigation allows for the entry page to the site to have content rather than navigation. As of now, some relevant information resides in sections of the site that are not technically part of MCS, which means users lose the navigation when they click on some of the links.

In addition to having “about” type information on the main MCS page, I have also used html code generated by FeedBurner to import two RSS feeds. One is from the MCS blog and the other is a feed generated by out Innovative Interfaces OPAC. That is a customized feed of new additions to our film collection. Links for subscribing to these 2 feeds is on the right navgation.

I am still working on some details of the new look but hope that the new site and the blog will be live by the end of March.

A Few Tweaks

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As I mentioned before, part of the reason I wanted to move Tombrarian to my own hosted site was to learn more about the inner workings of blogging and web design, so I do want to chronicle the changes I make along the way.

A few things I have done since moving Tombrarian:

  1. Added the plugin FeedBurner Feed Stats. This only appears on the administrative side. I use the WordPress.com Stats plugin for Being and Formulating, but decided to try this plugin for Tombrarian since I’m using FeedBurner to get more thorough statistics.
  2. Changed the permalink format to include date and post title.
  3. Removed the yourminis widgets from the home page and added html code from FeedBurner. I want something on the homepage to show the latest posts from my two blogs. The yourminis widget was fine, but since I’m using FeedBurner, I decided to use code instead. Plus, I can have more control of the look so that they seem more a part of the site.
Before: yourminis widget

Before: yourminis widget

After: FeedBurner links

After: FeedBurner links