The Sustainable Scoop Gets a Facelift!

As you’ve probably noticed, The Sustainable Scoop has a new design. There was nothing inherently wrong with the old design, exactly, though as I mentioned before I just couldn’t seem to get away from the feeling that it was “formulated” somehow. In short, my personal blog had become much less personal, and I could feel myself beginning to lose interest.

I chose this new design for several reasons, not the least of which are the features of this new theme. Thesis is by far the most comprehensive theme I’ve found, in both SEO and in design. I’m a designer by trade, but lately I’ve had a lot of work come my way, and I just don’t have the time to make a million tiny little design changes here and there. Chris Pearson, the designer behind Thesis, has done an amazing job of allowing users to make myriad design and function tweaks without having to edit any code. This has already saved me a lot of time.

I like that the sidebars in the new design are both on the right. I always found the old design, with the main content in the center, to be distracting. This way, all of the “extras” will be on the right side of the page, allowing readers to focus on the content much more easily. This does lend itself to the problem of an unbalanced page, particularly once you scroll down past the end of the sidebars; but I decided that this issue wasn’t enough to keep me from loving the new design.

I’ve also simplified some things here at the Scoop. For one, all of the archives will be organized in an “Archives” tab at the top of the page. I’m also going to simplify some of the content, but I’m not sure how yet. I’ve decided that I can’t really eliminate any categories, since the stuff I write here has such a broad scope. I’m just going to reduce some of the time it used to take me to write, manage, and update the site. I used to have to manually update the Pages for several types of posts, and this effort became a deterrent to posting anything. So, anything that wastes time will be removed or redistributed.

I’m going to be focusing more of my posts around gardening (biointensive, in particular), since this has become a major passion of mine. The image currently in use in the site’s header is a photo of the garden at Ecology Action in Willits, California. As my own garden grows and changes, I’ll be updating the header with photos from my own garden. That’s the idea, anyway, and I hope that in this way I can share some of my gardening with you guys.

Another feature of the new site that I’m particularly proud of are the six colorful squares in the top of the sidebars. These are resources that I’ve deemed worthy of occupying that space, I receive no money whatsoever in exchange for featuring those resources. I just really believe in what each one of those organizations are doing. What I’ve chosen to feature also resonates with my own sustainability practices, so I really wanted to share them with you.

If you guys have any thoughts on the new site, please let me know. I’m not aiming to please everyone, but I do want to make reading the Scoop as pleasant for as many of you as possible. If you have thoughts, please share them in the comments. Thanks!