I’ve been pondering how to handle this on my site for a while because my original idea is lacking.
I’ve got a lot of little odds and ends on my site (movie reviews, concert reviews, some stories, special pages for resources and events) that wouldn’t fit cleanly under my other tabs (art, blog, outgoing links).
My initial idea was to make a “Junk Drawer” page that has images linking to each different page. But I don’t like how it looks, and having to draw a new thumbnail for each page I want to make has slowed me down and even killed my motivation for some pages. It also means that the bigger pages in the junk drawer don’t stand out among the smaller bits.
I’ll admit the whole page could use a redesign in terms of assets and formatting, but I don’t like it much as is, so I’m trying to decide if it’s worth a fresh coat of paint or if I should just think of something else from scratch.
I thought I’d see how other people handle stuff like this in the hopes that it will inspire me!
resources; a links page for specifically useful links, organized by topic, designed to be useful/easy to navigate/accessible
links; links page for buttons, personal sites, interesting sites, fun sites, etc that aren’t necessarily useful.
fun; toys, random generator, galleries of funny things, collection of widgets and pin buttons, other stuff that’s fun/neat
projects; codejam pages, tutorials, plant ID project, textbook art gallery, other bigger/longer-term projects
personal; my collages, blog, and scrapbook
fandom; shrines, bl recs, itch game reviews
occasionally it’s hard to figure out where to put stuff - my “for you” section with premade layouts and tiled backgrounds is in “fun” atm but maybe would be better as its own top-level section or in projects or something, i keep waffling about where to put it - but mostly these top-level categories are broad enough that there’s a place to put everything! (the distinction between what goes in “fun” and what goes in “projects” is difficult to articulate and maybe only makes sense to me, but it does make sense to me which is the important part :P)
my site doesn’t have a central subject or theme or purpose, so i’m much more likely to make a new specific category than a “misc” section. it’s all miscellaneous! written bits and bobs like general reviews or stories are things i would put in my blog or the fandom section.
<my2cents>
this is how i would Personally reorganize your site’s contents (site organization is very personal and what makes sense to and feels intuitive for me is not necessarily Correct or helpful for other people!)
blog; i’d add concert log, reviews, skibidi toilet bit to the blog personally. but if you want the blog to be a diarytype that’s separate from the other writing, a writing section could hold the blog + other pieces as subsections under it
collections; blinkies, stamps, color club
links; button wall, external links, webrings
</my2cents>
good luck with your redesign! redesigning a page can be a pain but it’s also really refreshing when it’s done… reminds me of when i’ve just vacuumed and tidied my room and everything is fresh and clean haha.
If you’ve got multiple pages for reviews, sounds like you could use a Reviews category.
I’ve been rearranging the main index page a bit lately as I expand my site beyond what I had originally anticipated, and like @xixxii said, I like to use broad categories to try and group things according to what I have.
For instance, Watch Recs was originally off on its own within the main file folder, but then I decided to add Bookmarked Essays and so was able to group the two of those under Bookmarks. For the longest time I wasn’t sure what to do with the Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame, since it didn’t seem quite right for Bookmarks, so for a while I think it awkwardly sat next to my only webpage template under Projects, until I decided to create a new category for Compilations and broke off the webpage template into a new category called Templates & Guides. So the categories just emerge from whatever I happen to have, really.
I think @xixxii and @Coyote both made great suggestions. I’ve been wondering about this same thing on my site, where right now the categories are laid out like so:
But I’m not super satisfied either! I went with “Random” because it sort of fit the “everything else” vibe but also as a nod to my nostalgia. I feel like when I was a teen in the 2000’s we had a habit of calling everything random to be cute/funny.
but I kept my categories pretty broad/general, personal stuff for things that are very ‘me’ centric like my about, blog, and art gallery … fun for other things that are more silly like my minecraft forever world, media log for all media types, and other for anything that’s super misc like credits, guestbook, resources etc
(random is rlly cute as a header tho, i like that idea)
i dont really have a menu or anything with links to different categories but i link my sitemap on every page and that’s what i use to show the way pages are orgnaised. i basically decided on which topics i find important enough to turn them into categories, and then everything else gets sorted under these categories or in misc. some of the category labels wont ever have their own “hub” page (like i dont really feel lke making a general “misc” page listing all the other ones so i just keep the word without putting a link on it) and i could decide to move some things in and out of the misc category but for now this works for me
good luck with your redesign! redesigning a page can be a pain but it’s also really refreshing when it’s done… reminds me of when i’ve just vacuumed and tidied my room and everything is fresh and clean haha.
