Reorganizing my site home page

At this week’s Galactic Homebrew Website Club -- a bonus meeting of IndieWeb community members sporadically held on occasional weekends -- we discussed site layouts. We discussed sidebars and having different layouts for a homepage and other pages on one's site. Myself and another participant, Jeremy, both noted how we have different layouts for our home page and the rest of our sites.

While thinking through the architectures of our own sites, someone pointed out how blog posts on my site home page were pushed quite far down the page as I had a long bio at the top of the page. I had not noticed this because I had become so used to the way my site was. The perspective of someone else navigating my site was invaluable. This got us talking about the utility of longer bios on a home page where content is the main focus of a website.

After the discussion, I decided to revisit my site home page and make a few tweaks.

First, I have introduced a new sidebar layout. On the left side of my home page, I showcase all of the biographical information that was on the previous version of my home page. For people who have never visited my site before, the bio gives information I consider to be valuable. For recurring visitors, there is the rotating random message, my email address, and the spark lines showing trends in my blog posts and wiki contributions.

On the right side of the page, I have my list of posts, to which I have made a few revisions. Posts without a provided meta image will no longer show the default coffee image. I was made aware that the coffee image appeared in RSS feeds, too; confusing indeed since most of my posts of late have not concerned coffee. [1]

I have also:

1. Reduced the padding on each of the posts so I can fit more content on the page, and;
2. Removed the description from pinned posts so that the posts I choose to pin don’t push down my most recent posts (as was the case with the previous iteration of the design).

I’m excited to debut the new home page format!