Usability

I am continually making striving to improve the design of our community site, Unreality Shout. I'm quite fond of the grid-based design, but there's usually something that needs refined or improved.

A couple of days ago, I decided to move the search box to a more prominent place on the page. When I designed the site, I hastily threw in a search form as a sidebar block...right down around the bottom. I was never 100% happy about this arrangement, but my Drupal skills were weaker then.

However, I've been using Shout a lot more recently. And it started to bug me that I had to scroll to the bottom of the page to search for content. So I decided to bite the bullet and hard-code a search box into the top right-hand side of the header.

Tip for newbies: I thought I had all the code in place. But the search box failed to appear. Turns out that although I'd enabled the Search Box option in the global settings, it was switched off in my theme-specific settings. Whoops! Hopefully that's a time-saver for somebody else!

When I set this blog up, my intention was not to go overboard on SEO or anything like that, so I created a basic set of categories, none of which were particularly keyword-rich. The list of categories stands at:

• At Home - Seldom used, was originally intended for personal stories, but I realise I rarely post those (here, anyway)
• At Work - Originally intended as somewhere for posts about work and things I was doing in professional life. I've used this as a home for my tech tutorials as well though.
• In My Head - A category for philosophical flights of fancy. Ironically, or fittingly, it's become a dumping ground for random posts rather than anything poignant.
• On Blogging - Contains some good tutorials and posts about blogging.
• On Web Design - Another favourite category containin my notes and thoughts on web design. Has some good Drupal discoveries I've made recently.
• Unreality TV - Used for the odd update on what we're doing over at Unreality TV. Includes a good post from the Leon Jackson year of X Factor.