I’ve mad some major changes to the way that the Mac Museum part of my website is organized! I’ve had the museum page up for about 10 months now without any major changes. To be honest, it has been a bit of a struggle to keep up with all of the content that I wanted to post about it. I’ve been collecting a lot of stuff, but I haven’t had the time to do the proper research and drafting to put up quality content. Part of that was due to the fact that in order to post anything I had to do a huge write-up about it which usually took a week or more of research, writing, and editing. In addition, the layout was not very future-proof because it had huge images for each item that would eventually make a very large page once I added all of the items in the museum.
I’ve been thinking about a new layout for quite some time and I’m happy that I’ve had the time to put one in. The first thing that is different is that there is a large image slider at the top of the page which highlights one of the in-depth articles that I’ve written about a Mac. That makes it easy to visually find content and lets me advertise my latest stuff. Next is a small table containing a list of my latest additions and some additional articles. Prior to the new design, these were on top of each other and the list of latest additions was huge. In order to see any of my other profiles you had to scroll quite a bit.
Under Latest Additions and Additional Articles is the new Hardware Collection section that used to list all of the Macs that I had (or at least the ones I had written up). That has been replaced with a list of categories which link to other pages. This is where the major improvements are. If you click on a category, All-in-Ones for example, it will bring you to a summary page that lists all of the all-in-one models that I have in the museum. There is an image of each machine as well as a short write up. I followed a three paragraph format where the first paragraph introduces the model and its design significance, the second summarizes its technical specifications, and the third details the model or models that I personally own. If I have written a profile or included the model in another post it is linked at the bottom. The purpose of these pages is to allow me to write short summaries of the Macs and other hardware in my museum in a quick and efficient manner. It also makes it easier to find out additional information about models that are written up in multiple places.
The final change is in the menu at the top of my site. Previously, the only thing up there was the link to the Mac Museum, and under that a link to some other sites that have good Mac info. Now that I have more organization there are new sections for each category as well as links to each individual profile under that. All of these changes make the museum pages easier to update for me and easier to browse and read for you. Hopefully I can start filling it with more content 🙂
Relatively Ambitious 