From Brandon:
Welcome to the new V’s Voice. I hope you will find Vanessa’s site visually appealing, more feature rich and easier to use. If something within the design or structure doesn’t seem to make sense, leave a comment on this post and let us know. As you, the readers, continue to explore the site, we will continue to tweak and improve areas that we may have missed during the initial creation.
On the front-end, in addition to a whole new visual look, you’ll notice some great features. The homepage now has a slider for the three most recent posts—a quick and easy way to see V’s latest thoughts. The top has two navigational bars. The blue bar is for Vanessa’s primary writing categories and the pink tabs are for special pages. There are two additional features to assist you in finding Vanessa’s content—a search feature and a “tag cloud” with her category names sized based on the number of articles she has written under each category.
We added two features to help interact with you, her readers. The first is an e-mail notification of her new posts. You can subscribe at the bottom of any page and you will get a daily e-mail any day that V posts. No posts, no e-mail. Five posts in a day, one e-mail. This is in addition to the instant notification available through her RSS feed. Secondly, we have migrated to the Disqus commenting system. This system, used by a wide variety of sites, includes greater functionality to continue the discussion, including my favorite of being able to not only receive notification of a new comment, but be able to reply-by-email to respond.
In short, I am excited to be able to construct this new site for Vanessa and she is excited about the refreshed platform for sharing her thoughts with the world.
Hey, there. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to your blog here, but I wandered through tonight while on a different mission. I noticed something amiss in the footer, so I thought I’d comment and let you guys know.
I’m not totally sold on Disqus yet, but I must say that the ability to post an image straight to this comment, without uploading it anywhere else, is pretty fantastic.
Lindsay – Yeah, that’s one of my punchlist items to get knocked out with the new design. It seems to occur only in certain browsers with certain screen widths. I’m going to edit those three items to mimic the three footer areas (Recent Thoughts, etc) beneath it.
I like Disqus better than the built-in WP commenting system (at least as of ver 3. I don’t think there has been major overhaul in 3.1 or 3.2, but can’t recall offhand right now) and better than Intense Debate. My biggest complaint is that the commenting box isn’t valid XHTML and that, so far, I haven’t figured out how to share administrative duty with another admin (I have V’s site tied to my disqus acct and not sure how to share). In either case, I like it.
Thanks for the comment!