Working Author: Webzine

Brand New Look, Same Great Writing

Yippie!

Hooray!

Yay!

The webzine layout is here! I wish I could take full credit for the new design, but this is actually just a lightly modified version of Michael Jubel’s “arthemia” layout. I gotta hand it to him; this is a pretty ingenious design. Furthermore, he’s even built in spaces specifically for ads – a byproduct of a revenue-driven Internet – which I’m grateful for.

Well, from top to bottom, we have the title space for the blog title, tagline and a banner ad. Then we have the main navigation bar, which also has javascript drop-down functionality. Together, both areas makeup the header, which remains uniform throughout the blog.

Then for the homepage, Jubel created a top-section which has a nifty “Headline” division for the newest story, but also included a “Featured” section just to the right where I can highlight old blog posts or any kind of post for that matter. Another navigation bar divides the top and bottom areas. Sure this nav is a little redundant, since you can navigate just fine with the top nav, but since it doesn’t run uniformly throughout the entire blog, I think it’s a good way to highlight specific sections.

The bottom-section was initially just supposed to show two individual posts in their entirety from two different categories. I finagled it a bit to show five. To the right of that, there’s the sidebar, of course, with a bunch of different widgets active.

Then we finish with the footer, which has sections for recent posts, most commented and most viewed. All in all, I think this layout is pretty tight and really opens up the individual sections of the site to the reader, who may have overlooked them in the past.

For the single pages, like the one you’re reading now, I lifted the “Author” section below from Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo theme.

Lastly, there’s also a new favorites icon for your browser.

There are still a few kinks that need working out and there’s also plenty of room for improvement and customization, but overall, I’m pretty pleased with the way things turned out. I hope you like it, too.

Anyway, this weekend will entail the slow migration of the old content to the new format. Apologies in advance if anything looks a little broken. 🙁