Well, it’s a new year and one of our blog resolutions was to finally change the layout of Hawaii Book Blog. We’ve been running the simple “default” template since the beginning of Hawaii Book Blog (HBB) back in 2008. You may recall we did a makeover of our logo and banner back in August, which really helped to brand ourselves with an identity and set the stage for us to make design changes.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a template that satisfied all of the needs we required. At least, one that would accommodate our new banner and provide us with the extra columns that we desired. Those of you in the blog game may know how we felt.
After months of half-hearted searching, I finally told myself that there probably wouldn’t be a template that would be ready to go without some manipulation. I settled on one that I thought had a lot of potential and would be easiest to change, and then set upon re-coding it. Man…I haven’t written a web page since the 1990’s so I wasn’t up to snuff with CSS and PHP like I had been with HTML and JAVA. It took me a while, but I was finally ALMOST there with what I wanted. Then the holidays hit, and HBB was put on hold for the time being.
Fast forward to this past weekend…we finally decided to put out the new template, even if I felt it was still a bit unfinished with some of the peculiarities. Something screwy happened with WordPress and the site was down from Saturday night up until Sunday afternoon (I slept through most of it). Basically, I ended up having to delete everything and reinstall and upload the whole enchilada back on the server and here we are today.
I hope the new design makes it a little easier to navigate. One of the problems I had with the default design was that when you clicked on a single post, the sidebars would disappear and there were just less means of navigation to get you around the site. We may also experiment with abbreviating the posts on the Home page, which would require you to click on the post title in order to continue reading it. Also, some of the font structures and colors may change in the coming weeks as we slowly settle into a finalized design. Please bear with us with these changes!
Any feedback on the design, whether functional or aesthetic, would be greatly appreciated. You can leave a comment here, or e-mail me at aalba@hawaiibookblog[dot]com. Just don’t forget to replace the [dot] with a period.
Thank you once again to all of our readers for visiting our site. Now that this hill has finally been climbed, hopefully I can now focus more attention on reading and writing more posts. We have a lot of catching up to do this month, and with our Library Tour, but we are very positive about the future.
Mahalo!
