The New 2009 Travelvice Home Page
Plovdiv, Bulgaria

The Travelvice home page, as released for 2005, 2008 & 2009

Last year, on Christmas Eve, I released a new home page for Travelvice. I talked about the reasons and rational quite extensively in that travelogue entry, citing the growth/maturation of the site and problems with search engine results as primary reasons for the revamp.

But as the months have passed, so too have my positive feelings for the new design. Yes, it solved some problems and provided a more comprehensive platform for the different goings on within the site, but I was perpetually feeling less and less enthralled by the aesthetics and functionality of the thing.

Some of the new home page objectives that I wanted to accomplish:

To move away from the dark color scheme;
To bring more content to the front, and allow easier access to interesting content;
To make travelogue entries more noticeable;
To make the option to search for content more apparent; and
To return to an 800pixel width format (for those screen resolution-challenged visitors), just as the rest of the site adheres to

Overall, I'm quite happy with the way things have turned out with the redesign. I love how the new look has taken visual elements from the original 2005 release, but at the same time feels matured and full of content. Simply put, I'm feeling back on track with the look and feel, like this was the natural progression that the page should've made last year (but ran astray).

I think I'd still like to find a better way to get people into travelogue archive page and perhaps refine the mid-page tabbed content boxes slightly (be sure to check 'em out), but the page is certainly back in a solid, happy state.

So, for those of you stuck in the RSS readers, I invite you to break out and take a peek. You know, all those travelogue entries look much prettier on the page than they do as unformatted text in an RSS feed.