Today I decided to work on a design for this site. I’ve always disliked designing for myself. None of the work I do for myself ever seems to meet the high expectations I want to achieve for my own personal self expression. After abandoning several attempts, I poked through the WordPress theme repository and fingered through my worn copy of ‘the Zen of CSS Design’ to try and absorb a bit of visual inspiration. With renewed motivation, I popped open an empty PhotoShop document and went to work, only to end in yet another unsatisfying attempt. Frustrated, I took a step back and stared at the mess of designs in front of me. Suddenly I realized where I was going wrong. It’s all in the navigation! I’ve worked for several years on corporate intranet and web sites. Most of them, if not all, focused on the navigation as the central element of the design. In fact, every design started with the navigation bar and the design expanded out from there. It may have been the presentation of tree flow diagram prior to the design, or that I was also closely linked to the code development of the site, but ‘navigation first’ seems to be the way most of my designs worked. I admit, this approach is not the perfect way to design, but it works for sites that have large, complicated, and multi-layered navigation. When information is buried deep in a site, you need to focus on getting the users there quick, so navigation needs to be a big focal point.

The realization I had with the design for this site was that I don’t want to focus on the navigation at all, I want to focus on the content. Specifically, I want to focus the audience to the article that was most recently posted (Maybe even the one you’re reading now). Sure all the posts will be linked so you can still easily find them by searching or browsing the categories, but the one you probably came to read will be the one at the top of the home page so you’re not going to use a navigation bar to get there! There’s no real need for me to highlight how to get to my past archives. I’ll link to them somewhere so you could find them, but if you came to see something I wrote a while back, you either know what it’s about and where to find it, or you came here via hyperlink from a search engine or another site. Whichever way you got here, you’re probably going to find what your looking for without a heavy navigation bar.

As of now, the site still has one of the great WordPress themes (KISS I believe) but soon I’ll be re-doing the design yet again, only this time I’ll focus on highlighting the content rather than navigation so check back soon for JeffreySambells.com v1. Maybe this attempt will be successful!