Hello everyone! I’ve been working behind the scenes on digital organization while my wife has been busy talking about beauty products and nail polish (just kidding — I love you). Today we finally tackled a long-overdue refresh of our blog’s project organization, and I want to share what we changed and why. This overhaul focused on making our Projects page easier to browse and keeping it visually appealing, whether you’re sorting digital photos, filing paperwork, or cleaning up your desktop alongside us.
If you haven’t visited before, the Projects page is where we collected and categorized all of our project posts. It started as a simple list of linked descriptions and worked fine when we only had a few dozen posts. Over time, however, it grew into a long page filled with text links — more than 750 links at our last count, including duplicates for projects that appeared in multiple categories. We hadn’t updated it in months, so it was clear the page needed to be streamlined.
Our goals for the update were simple: pare down the clutter and make the page much easier to browse. Think of the Projects section more like browsing at a bookstore: you wander into a category, scan the covers, and find something that catches your eye. If you need to find a specific post, the site search is still the fastest route, but the refreshed project gallery is now far more user-friendly for casual browsing.
Condensing the content was the straightforward part: we merged and simplified categories, reducing duplicate listings without removing any projects. The more time-consuming task was adding photos. We decided to give each project a visual cover, so you can scan thumbnails rather than read through a sea of links.
We had been planning to add thumbnails and to give each category its own page for a while. After evaluating plug-ins against our template and category structure, we discovered the most reliable approach was to hard-code the thumbnails. That meant many hours of manual relinking and coding — more than 600 thumbnails created by hand — but the result is worth it: the page is easier on the eyes and quicker to scan.
Thumbnails help you spot projects that fit your interests more quickly, and they make browsing more enjoyable overall. Visual cues are generally more effective than long lists of text links, especially when you’re looking for inspiration or a project idea.
The updated layout now features a main projects page with a preview of each category using a few thumbnails, plus a “more” link that opens a full page devoted to each category. The categories listed on the site include:
- Most Popular
- Painting
- Decorating
- Furniture Upgrades
- Crafting & Art
- Home Improvement
- Outdoor Projects
- Cleaning, Organizing & Eco
- Love & Marriage
- Money Saving
- Kids & Pets
- Holiday & Entertaining
- Videos
- Projects by Month
We’ll update these category pages every few weeks to include recent projects, so the gallery should stay reasonably current. The ordering within each category mixes popular and favorite projects with logical groupings (for example, kitchen and bathroom remodels are grouped together). We didn’t strictly sort by date; instead we shuffled items to keep the page lively and easy to browse — much like wandering a bookstore shelf and letting a cover catch your eye.
I hope you like the refresh. With this project wrapped up, I’m turning my attention to another big organizing task on my to-do list: the basement. I’ll share more on that soon. In the meantime, what digital or paper organization projects are you working on? Any tips to share, or are you planning to tackle something tonight?
If you were hoping for a classic organizing how-to post, check out our newly organized Cleaning & Organizing page, which collects about fifty posts on the subject.