A Picture’s Worth… Well, You Know: a house log

Hi folks! I have been behind the scenes messing around with tech organization while the lady wife chats about feminine products and nail polish and whatever else she has been chatting about lately (justkiddinghoneyIloveyou) but since today is the day we said we’d get on some paper/tech org – specifically some journal streamlining (but you folks can tackle anything like digital photos, filing paperwork, or cleaning up your desktop) I am here with the goods on that. With all the organization happening around our house this week it was bound to spill over to some journal organization eventually. And the portion of our site that was feeling the most out of control was our Projects page. You know, the one under our journal header that says “Projects”?

In case you’ve never visited, it is where we attempted to sort all of our project posts into categories.

Our plain system of a linked description for each one worked well when there were only a few dozen posts to link to. But as time went on and our project tally grew, it kinda turned into this sea of text that made even our eyes cross a little bit. We last counted over 750 links on that page (admittedly with duplicates, since some projects fell into multiple categories). And we hadn’t even updated it since December, so our best guess was that we could hit 1,000 once we brought in five more month’s worth of links. Yikes.

So the last couple of week’s we have been working on an overhaul. The goals? 1. Pare down. 2. Make it easier to browse. And we say “browse” quite specifically, since it is likely best to think of this section like you might casually peruse a bookstore looking for a good read: head to your go-to section and see what title strikes your fancy. If you are looking for a specific item, it is likely best to hit up our information desk search bar, although it cannot hurt to breeze through the project page now that we have given it a pleasant swift kick in the pants a much-needed upgrade.

Paring down was the easier part. We condensed 26 categories into 16, eliminating a lot of duplicate listings without eliminating any projects. But as far as browse-ability? Let us borrow from the bookstore metaphor again and simply say that we gave all of our projects a cover:

We had been planning to add photo thumbnails for a while, along with giving each category its own page (we have consistently enjoyed project galleries with pleasant glossy pics like Kate’s and Stephanie’s and Layla’s) but we truly had to work up the energy. Let us simply say there were some fairly decent man hours (and woman hours) spent relinking everything and creating and coding all 600+ thumbnails (we tried a few plug-ins but due to our template and our categories we learned that we had to hard code them all by hand). Whew. But now that it is done, and our eyes do not see code floating in front of them when we close them anymore, it was totally worth it.

Adding an image to each project makes scrolling through each category much easier on the eyes, while also hopefully helping you zero in on the type of project that you might want to tackle faster. Plus, are not pictures simply prettier anyways?

So now there is one main projects page with a few thumbnails of each category to give you a feel, and then you can click “more” to see an whole page devoted to each of the 16 categories, which are:

We plan to update them every few weeks with the latest projects we have tackled so it should consistently be reasonably current (we have not brought in any of the O-R-G posts that we have done this week, but will add them and more in the next few weeks). The order of each of those category pages is admittedly a bit willy-nilly. We tried to put some of our go-tos/most popular towards the top while keeping some logical groupings throughout the rest of it (like lumping all of our kitchen and bathroom remodeling projects together). Of course we did not want all of our oldest ones on the bottom (wop woppp), so we simply sort of shuffled things around and embraced the random-ocity of it. So in the end it is mostly a mixed bag. Like a book store. Simply pull one off the shelf, check out the cover, and see if you want to flip it open…

Hope you folks like the little revamp. With this now complete I can turn my attention to another big organization project on my to-do list (ackthebasement). But more on that tomorrow! In the meantime, what paper/tech org have you folks taken on lately? Any pointers for the group? Or are you gearing up to knock something out tonight?

Psst- If you are shaking your fist at your screen wishing this was a more traditional organizing and paring down post, simply hit up our newly organized Cleaning & Organizing page (how’s that for being meta?) where you will find 50 posts on the subject.

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