Spark Update: More New Layout Hijinks

As you’ve no doubt realized, I’ve been working on the Spark’s layout over the last few days in an attempt to make the site feel a little more like a proper news outlet and a lot less like a personal blog. Hopefully, once all the changes are in place, it’ll make the site easier to navigate and more pleasant to look at.

Of course, you’re probably wondering if this is worth all the effort, right? After all, I’m shaking things up, so I’d better have a good reason. I do, actually.

The biggest benefit of the new layout is the front page structure, which is cleaner and tighter than the old blog layout. It also has snippets of content, rather than the whole post, allowing a better use of the space. And it has a wonderful function to include thumbnail images next to the posts, which I’m very much in favor of.

The navigation menus should be easier to understand, and I’ve removed the links to some of the rarely used things, like the Community Directory. Hopefully, the result will be a less overwhelming number of options with disappointingly little information on the other side.

Another really snazzy feature is threaded commenting, which I tried on the Spark several months back through a plugin, but was never really happy with. This version is native to the theme, so it should work perfectly. Why is this important? Well, now you can reply directly to a specific comment, allowing tangential conversations to take place on the comments without derailing the whole conversation.

In theory, at least, the page should also load faster than it used to. The effects of this won’t be seen until I turn the caching feature back on (which won’t happen until I’m finished customizing the layout and the style sheet), but hopefully it’ll make visiting the site a little more pleasant of an experience.

Of course, there’s quite a lot of tweaking and customizing to do, and given that I’m no web designer, it may be a week or two before every kink in the site is worked out. If you don’t like something about the site, find a glitch that needs addressing, or simply have a suggestion for how it can be improved, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Also, it was suggested yesterday that I have an open call for a new Spark logo. While I’ve been working on a new logo design, I’d really like to see other ideas. If you have a concept, and don’t mind sharing your ideas, I’d be happy to take a look.

Tags: Blog Report, In-House, internet, Sparkle City Blogs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.