Blog Makeover 2026 Edition
Posted on January 27, 2026 by Aywren
So, the astute eye may have noticed that I’m updating the layout of Aywren’s Nook. I know this comes on the heels of having finished moving the site into this HTML format a few years back, but I’ve been thinking long and hard about what I want to do with this site, and I landed on this.
Rather than just being a “Game and Geek Blog” – which there’s nothing wrong with that – I decided that in its 12th year of existence, I wanted to give it a little more focus and personality. When I first started this blog, I was in my mid-30s, which is a nebulous time of life. Now, I’m dipping into middle-age, and I’m still gaming and geeking just as hard as I’ve ever done, given the constraints of adult life.
I wanted this blog to reflect that, hence the new tagline: “Reflections of a Middle-Aged Gamer.” I even considered going the route of spinning off a new site and new blog for this. I even EVEN considered thinking about a possible WordPress, though after thought, I decided that’s not something I wanted to go back to.
After poking around at all the possible ideas (renaming, rebranding, new site, new domain, etc.), I decided to buckle down and work with the site I have to bring about the ideas I’d like to see. A new domain is not ideal because this domain name does well enough in search results and Google indexing, even in the age of AI search. I also don’t need to be spending money on spinning up a new blog, especially on WordPress, when what I have is already serviceable enough.
I took some time to look around at other the blogs that I follow and noticed pretty much all of them run a layout with a top navigation and one sidebar, on the right. While I don’t absolutely need to be like everyone else, I was looking for a way to streamline and clean up my layout. Maybe make it feel a little more professional and a little less like the HTML cobbled-project that it really is.
So, I’ve updated the header to be more sleek (I might change it again later). I’ve removed the left sidebar to offer more space for the post content – which I actually like now that I’ve done it. I’ve also cut down on the clutter in the remaining sidebar and folded as much content as I could into other areas.
I’ve put more time into building out and segmenting my Topics section. I’ve also brought the topics out in a grid layout to the front page while rolling the latest posts into a slideshow feature at the top. I’ve made the navigation menu buttons larger and cut down the number of links there for better focus.
This is still a work in progress. For example, I want to hard focus the Topics part of this site for improved usability – rather than just a list of links. I’ll probably go with a grid layout there, too, in the individual topics sections.
On topic pages, I’ve made it so that the most recent year’s content is open automatically when you browse a page. Previously, you needed to click it to open the drop-down. I used these drop-downs to organize the topic pages, especially when there were many years and many post links. But I think starting out with the top box open is more inviting.
I’ve also rebuilt the link hamburger for mobile users and I’m making additional clean-ups and tweaks for the mobile browsing experience. Mobile is such a painful extra to have to think about when you’re building a site now days, but I do try to provide a good mobile experience.
Needless to say, this is going to be another long-term project. While this is not as extensive as the previous content move I had to make back when I first built this site, every page will need to be updated manually to make this layout change. I take comfort in knowing that once the change is there, though, I feel like I won’t need to fiddle with the overall structure of the pages like this any time in the near future.
Content within the header, navigation, footer and sidebar are always editable site-wide and aren’t an issue. Really, just the work to remove the left sidebar, replace the right sidebar, and update the new mobile links.
So, yes. For a while, this blog will be in a weird transitional state. Don’t be surprised if you find pages that still have two sidebars. All the newest posts of this year, as well as all the main and topic pages, have been updated. But until I can go through each section and make changes, this blog has become a work in progress project once more.
But, ultimately, I’m happy with what I’m doing, and that’s what’s important.