With the flurry of new activity and the fact that the current digivation design/layout is growing rather old (approaching the one year mark), I have been contemplating a redesign of the site. This isn’t a new idea – I’ve never been 100% happy with the current layout and have been brainstorming, sketching and creating mock-ups for several months.

With the recent addition of another writer and a plan to write at least sixty posts next month (and keep up the trend in the coming months), the issue of archives and “lost content” is coming into play. Currently the only way to find older content is via Google, because for some random reason I disabled the internal search (bad move) or, by browsing the articles using the “previous posts” link at the bottom of the main page (at one time I had a real archive section I broke it through various upgrades and changes).

However, simply having a mere “archives” page isn’t going to cut it. I want to devise a more intuitive and user-friendly way for curious readers to find more related content. So far, I hope to implement some of the following (through current and to-be-written plugins and enhancements):

• Links to Related Posts at the end of each article
• List of recent comments on the main page (so you can easily find active discussions)
• Some way of listing popular posts on the front page – perhaps by votes or by visits
• Definitely re-enable searching!
• Tag cloud?
• Better structure and tagging of pre-existing and future articles (this will require going back and editing the 100+ articles currently in the archives)

These are just a few preliminary ideas that I have come up with while contemplating the future design of digivation (and I am aware of the plugin options for implementing these ideas). I also hope to keep the layout open enough to integrate the dis-used photo gallery into the site.

Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be creating mock-ups and looking for inspiration. If you have any suggestions or ideas on how to tackle some of the outlined problems, please do not hesitate to leave a comment!