New Blog Layout

**Update**

It's Feb. 20th and we got enough feedback to know that the new blog design just wasn't working... so we're back to the old version, for who knows how long. I guess with my next attempt I'll keep it to a more standard format.

**End Update**


I'm sure many of you know someone who has "music A.D.D."; you're driving down the road and they listen to 30 seconds of a song and then change it, never settling in to listen to an entire song. Well, I apparently have blog-design-A.D.D. and have been itching to redesign our blog for a while. Attempt number one resulted in what Erin correctly called a "complete failure." What you see now is attempt number two.

I personally love the new design... but I designed it. Erin's not completely convinced yet, but it seems like she's starting to come around. Anyway, I'm curious to hear what all of you have to say... do you like the new look or the old look better? I've backed up my old files, so I can reset to the old layout in about ten seconds if the response to the new design is overwhelmingly negative.

As for the new design, there is now a lot less scrolling and a lot more buttons. The buttons hopefully won't be too confusing, but just in case here's the breakdown.

- Out of order, but most important is the "stop" button... most of the buttons trigger a pop-up and the stop button closes them all.
- The "power" button will take you to blogger.com, if you have an account this means it'll take you to your dashboard.
- The "rewind" button will display our monthly archives and ten most frequent posts. Hit the stop button to close.
- The "play" button will display our uploaded videos from Vimeo, these can be browsed chronologically (based on when we uploaded the video), there is also an option for full-screen viewing. Again, stop will close this.
- The "fast-forward" button takes you to the LDS website. Erin looked at me quizzically, wondering how that made sense... I told her the church is all about progressing and moving forward. I'm a dork, this should not be news to anyone.

- The "home" button will reset the page. Using this will reset everything and close open pop-ups, but may take a tiny bit longer than the stop button.
- The "B" button (Blogger icon) will display a list of blogs we follow. If your blog is not on this list, let me know. Use stop to close.
- The "globe" button will display a list of websites we love. Stop closes this (see the repeating pattern?)
- The "camera" button will start a slideshow of a subset (as defined by me, this may change) of our photos on Flickr. Once the slideshow has started, you can zoom into full-screen mode, browse through the included photos, or you can click the Flickr logo to see our Flickr site. Stop closes the slideshow, or the open Flickr page.
- The "book" button will display our never-too-long list of books. Again, use stop to close the LibraryThing page.


Please leave your feedback, since I designed the page it all makes perfect sense to me... if it doesn't for you, or if anything isn't working how it's supposed to, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Labels: books, pictures, religion, video

posted by Brett at 11:37 PM