While working on my site design, I went through the various points laid out in chapter 7 of Letting Go of the Words by Redish. It is a fun exercise to see the differences between designs and how they can affect the presentation of the content. 

It is recommended to use a search box. I wanted to put that in the top of the right sidebar, but Weebly requires users to pay for search functionality. This is a shame because searching is a fantastic way for users to navigate a site when they know exactly the words they want to find. Savvy users could perhaps use a regular search engine, like Google, and type in "site:http://halloweenbagsearly.weebly.com/" and then their search term. Sometimes, however, the major search engines do not crawl blogs often enough.

With that in mind, I figured out a way to get a Google custom site search onto my page. However, searching for "persona" in that custom search yields no results even though one can clearly see two posts below containing the keyword.

I removed my name from the header, because it was off to the right in Passive Space. There's no reason to ever look over at that area, so I just left it blank. This resulted in a cleaner look. The site title in the heading is not a logo yet, (hopefully I can use part of the GIMP assignment to do this) but it is a clean, large font that is easily readable and is aligned with the rest of the content. I made sure the menu was aligned properly as well, even though I only have two pages at the moment. 

The sidebar contains valuable information for the reader, including a quick summary about me (the "About" link in the top menu simply links to my "Introduction" post for now) including a link to my twitter account. I've also included the categories menu which will allow readers to select between "personal" posts and "group work" posts. This might be helpful for our instructor.

One could say my site layout is kind of plain, but I prefer to focus on the content and use a minimalist style. I believe that Redish supports my design sensibilities so hopefully the content on this page will begin to speak for itself.



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    Blaine Brown

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    Writer and master of all things tech. I also play a lot of video games.

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