A Complete Overhaul From All Fronts

Ahoy, friends.  Pop on your sunglasses, have a pre-emptive paracetomal and then click on through... I've redesigned my whole blog!  Remember when Dorothy arrives in Oz and suddenly everything is lurid, surreal, and a little bit scary? Same thing going on right here.

Still can't tempt you to leave your Reader?  Okay, I'll walk you through it.  That up there is the new header.  The (admittedly incongruous) speech bubbles are individual clickable links to separate pages within the blog.  Like if you click on the Sewing With Knits bubble, you get taken here:

All of the relevants posts in my major categories organised into a single page  with images and links.  Handy, no?  And if you click on the 'About Me' bubble in the header, you get taken here:



As you can see, Sidebar Me will always be looking over at my blog content with suspicion, and rightfully so.  The Sidebar rainbow directly below Sidebar Me contains clickable links to external sites like my main and Etsy shops and all social media activities.

A little bit below the big rainbow in the Sidebar are smaller rainbows of clickable links by category.  These are either subjects with lots of post tags and / or things that have a lot of page views or engagement.  Or maybe just some things I'm nostalgic about and want to trick you into clicking on.  My many, many, way-too-many labels have moved from the sidebar into a cloud at the bottom because it was a hot mess.  Fun fact: the category 'Sewing' is obviously the largest, the 'Kids' category is in second place, 'Patterns' in third... can you guess the fourth?  'Self-pity'!  That made me laugh, although I do use it in a melodramatic / self-deprecating fashion most of the time.  Promise.   

And.........., has anyone noticed something else new round these parts?  My Shop has also had a full re-design!  As my product range and variety has increased, the old site was struggling to organise everything in a coherant way.  Navigation was not easy or intuitive, I will admit.  But now there are drop-downs in the menu below the header, a separate pages for separate sub-strates.  For example, if you hover over 'Fabric' you get the option of clicking on fabric as a whole, prints as a whole, prints by fabric type, plain fabrics, scraps, etc.  Same goes for the clothing category.  To improve navigation and make things easier for you to browse / find, products are viewable on all pages that are applicable.

For example, this lion jersey is found in 'Fabric', 'Printed Fabric', and 'Printed Jersey'.  Also, within the product pages there are now thumbnails at the bottom for related products to click on.  Have you ever seen anything so dynamic from me before?

I appreciate your excitement has probably mounted to almost unbearable levels by now, but here are a few more things that are worth celebrating.  The Fabric Shop is officially a year old, and now includes fabric from nine companies from four different countries!  It's been a whirlwind ride with lots of peaks and troughs along the way, but I don't regret doing it even a tiny bit.  Last thing: from spending an ungodly amount of time editing posts and tags, I realised I've written just over 1000 posts here now.  That's a lot of self-pity.