Welcome to the new Visual Vocabularie ! I’ve been working on this new version since the beginning of my hiatus, which is (partly) why I haven’t actually blogged in a couple of, NINE, 11 months, a year, forever! There is something ironic about spending months designing a blog, but not actually blogging, isn’t there? It’s been ALMOST ready to go since June 2013; so much happened between then and now, but I’ll save that for another, more personal post. I’m excited to be back, and with a whole new layout and new functionality!

New Domain + Spelling Change

Since I settled on a name for my blog, I’ve wanted the domain and the name to match. My hubs insists that domain names are increasingly inconsequential as time goes on, and while I see his point, my desire has not swayed. When I decided that I want jesykaditri.com (the previous home of this blog) to become my portfolio and resume site, I knew it was finally time to switch domains. However, we always had a little problem with the availability of the visualvocabulary.com domain, which led me to changing the spelling… You may have noticed that I dropped the –y from vocabulary for –ie. Obviously, I take license with spelling on occasion (re: my first name), but this time it’s not just to become the butt of a modern comedian’s joke ^_^;!

There are a few reasons behind the spelling change; 1) A significant amount of people blindly follow my website thinking it’s actually got something to do with learning the English language, or thinking my website is some sort of word game! I think the –ie ending will help to signify that my website is not academic in the traditional sense 2) From a branding perspective the –ie is similar to paperie, which fits in nicely with my stationery work, 3) However, the most influential reason for the change is also a quite practical one; the domain name visualvocabularie.com was actually available! I inquired about visualvocabulary.com a while back, and they wanted over $4,000 for it! But I think this works out better, right?

What does this mean for old links to my blog from pinterest, etc? Tyler will set everything up so all should forward directly to this domain. Hopefully there will be no issues, but if you can’t seem to find something you are looking for from my old blog, please do not hesitate to ask! The domain jesykaditri.com will continue to exist as the old visual vocabulary for a short while longer; then I will wipe the blog off that domain, and I will begin to design my new portfolio and resume site.

A new domain does mean that if you want to continue following my blog via a reader or email, you’ll have to sign up again; a link to my bloglovin’, my RSS and an email subscription are on the right sidebar under “follow me“.

New Layout

The biggest difference between the old blog design and this one is the new navigation pages and archive formatting. I thought pretty hard about how I like to look through and navigate blogs, especially when I discover a new one… I particularly like to see all the posts pertaining to a particular event or project, in order to see the whole process. I also like to see images or photos, instead of just text when I do a search. If I’m looking at a home blog, I love to see a layout and floorplan of the home. I incorporated these ideas into this blog design; I edited my categories (more on that later), and gave some of the bigger ones their own page in the top navigation bar.

First is the new about page with photos and blurbs about me and others who might make frequent appearances here on visual vocabulary, and it’s also where you’ll find places where this blog has been featured around the web.

Next we have a direct contact page. Why didn’t I have one before?! So weird.

Third, we have the Home Tour page. It features a very cool interactive scaled layout of our apartment, where when you hover over a room, it will display the room in full color and if you click the link, it will take you to all the posts regarding that room (this feature does not work on mobile or tablet, because it requires a hover state, but you can still click through).

After the home tour page, we have the gallery pages; one for events and one for projects. The Event Gallery page gathers all the posts pertaining to one event under a single header, for ease in exploring each event! Large thumbnails of a featured photo for each post make the subject of the post much more viewable.

The Project Gallery organizes all my projects; big, small, painted, crafted, cooked–what have you!

The Laelia’s Outfits category also gets its own full gallery page, to easily see all her outfits side by side!

Finally, there is the Design Services + Shop page which I plan to have a price list for various services and downloadables listed, and I reserve the right to never actually move beyond the “under construction” status of this tab. But in my dreams I’ll have enough time to create patterns for the few quilts I have made, digital wallpapers, prints of my paintings, etc.

New Categories

My old method of categorizing my blog just wasn’t really working for me anymore (I’m not sure if it ever did!). Now I have eight basic categories, and subcategories within them;  be inspired, blogging + elsewhere, events, home tour, let’s get personal, my work, outfitting laelia, projects + diy. Some of these overlap with the new pages and some don’t, but they all have an image based display, which I find much easier to search through, and much more fun!

The new design and layout has some more finessing to be had, and I know of a few bugs, but it’s been so long I think I just need to publish. What do you readers think?! What do you like? What is confusing, or should be changed? Did you find a bug? Is there anything else you’d like to see? Please let me know it the comments below!