New Design is Live

June 28, 2008

Once again, Marktopia has a new design with some changes to the way some stuff was done with the organization of the site as well.  The first thing I want to do is give credit to PSHero.com for their Interstate Road Sign tutorial in Photoshop.  The wonderful detail it gave set the theme for the new design and allowed me to add more texture to the site.

The next thing you will notice is that the Categories are back.  When WordPress introduced the tagging feature, I jumped all over it and abandoned the categories.  It allowed me to do the tag cloud I had on the previous design and made me feel all Web 2.0.  When working on this new design though, I realized without categories, I had lost some focus for what I blog about.  I decided to look at my content a little harder and found everything could fit into 5 neat buckets, Music, Personal, Pick of the Week, Reviews and Web Technology.  I went through the lengthy task of adding a category to each post so now if you only want to follow one type of post on my site, you can use the RSS feed for that category.

This is also a nice lesson for other bloggers, use categories and tags together on your site.  Combining few categories with many different tags gives you a well rounded organization for your site and can also help you better define what you want your site to be.  I would love to hear opinions of the site, so feel free to comment below.