The New Look
I have been meaning to update the look and feel of my site for a while. Well... now it's done. Mostly. I'm certain I'll find a few broken links or the odd formatting problem here and there. As I write this, I know I still need to clean up the sortable tables on the Lightroom and ON1 Learning Centers. If you find a problem, please, please let me know so I can fix it up.
So what drove me to update the site? You. I want your experience visiting my site to be easy. You find what you want, there's not a lot of noise, and so on. Statistics don't lie. The most popular landing page on this site is my blog. My cover page was a close second... but looking deeper, the very next page people would visit is the blog. So... the blog is now the landing page.
The old layout felt cluttered, too. The new design is wider. I also ditched the sidebar. Over time, I was removing more and more things from the sidebar, and what was left kinda felt like it was there for the sake of being there. I will miss it as a place to highlight new products... but I'll figure that out eventually.
My storefront was cobbled together. Now, everything is in a single page with very clear separators. Each product group is in scrollable carousels so as more products get added (yes, I'm working on something else now :) it'll be quick for me up to update the store and get new goodies out faster. I still need to to add some anchor links and smooth scrolling to the store front.... I'm still testing out those changes.
The last thing I definitely wanted is a way to display photos big. My cover page was great for that, and I wanted that for my other photos, too. I'm really happy with how the Photos section of the site looks now. If you haven't checked it out, please have a look.