I’ve thought about a few things and asked the question “why?” about so many elements of the site. I’ll be honest—I love the design. I’ve been working on it for months and polished it so much that it’s finally something I can live with—but what it was really lacking before now, was a good format for reading content. Lately, I’ve been brewing plans for a few modifications to the structure and rebuilding certain elements of the site—in particular, the blog (notebook).

If you’ve been here before, you’re probably looking at this now and noticing things missing—that’s the main change. Basically, what I had done was bite off more than I could chew when I first launched. Nuvo has turned into a bit of a side-project now that I’m working part-time full-time at WebSalad so I don’t have all the time to spend on it that I used to. I’ll be sticking to a schedule and making regular updates and releases but it’s going to take some hard yakka to get that structure in place.

There has been two main reasons behind the updates;

1. To create a more suitable and easier to read format for the articles
2. To build an easier to manage, flexible workflow for me to maintain

I can happily say I have a clear purpose and set of goals for this site now;

1. Portfolio of freelance web design projects
2. Notebook for news, release notes and design articles
3. Online Store for purchasing WordPress themes

And that’s it! Simple.

Here’s an overview of the main changes that have taken place relating to this update:

• The “file cabinet” is gone—this is now something I’m only going to do through social media, rather than spamming my own site with links to content a lot of people won’t care for
• The blog has a new layout, much cleaner, more “notebook-like” and easier to maintain—also heavily powered by jQuery now
• Two categories have been removed for now, I’ll only be blogging design articles, news releases such as this and release notes for my themes
• Content filters have been removed from the blog, now articles are simply tagged under a topic and archived for easy access from the sidebar
• Commenting threads have been reversed, so that the most recent comments appear at the top
• The comment box has been re-built and moved directly underneath the article (before the actual comments) to encourage discussion on articles
• The AIDA model has been applied to the home page in a more solid format—I’ll be running tests to see how this performs… more on this soon
• News, files and releases no longer feed through to the landing page—I want to keep my landing page all about the work and the products

For a long time, I’ve had a set of articles saved in my database, almost ready to be published—but I didn’t want to release them until I had a format I was really happy with. Finally, I feel like I’ve found that format.