Why yes, we have done something new with our hair! If by “hair” you mean “sidebar,” that is.
STC's Notebook is approaching its second birthday (3 August!), so we're starting to look at some minor changes to refresh the look of the site a bit. Today Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger played around a bit with the sidebar.
First, I broke the ads up into two sets of four ads instead of having them all together. That allows the Tag Cloud to be a bit higher up. I also moved the Search field up to the top, instead of down at the bottom where it was before. And I edited the Archive field to be a drop-down menu instead of a clickable list of the past 24 (and counting) months. I think this allows for better search capability on the blog and also allows us to add two more ads without overloading the sidebar.
Thoughts? Advice? Suggestions? I'll be reevaluating the blog in the coming weeks and trying to come up with new recurring posts, such as the Path to Fellow and the old Community Spotlight blog posts. I'd love to hear your ideas as to ways to freshen up the site and new features to add. Email me, or post a comment below!
Changes look good, Kev! Keep up the good work 🙂
Hi Kevin,
Do the advertisers pay differently to be on the top quadrant or below the tag cloud? Also, Archives are now so far down that at first, I couldn’t find them. any chance of putting that dropdown above the Comment section? I expect a Comments section and don’t mind scrolling to get there. But I might completely lose the idea of an Archives link if I don’t see it.
Otherwise, all is well and I like the improvements! Good to keep thinking about these things. Usability is SO important!
Linda O
Since you asked so nicely … sure, Archives are moved!
As for your advertising question, all links in the bottom section are house ads, so we don’t charge ourselves for those. 😉