Brief update today - while I had intended to finish up the "Poems" section today, I mostly fixed some problems and experimented a little more with a few not-so-important things. Anyway, the poetry section is the biggest portion of the site, so finishing it will give me the thrust to take this puppy into the home stretch.

Now I'm considering the disparity between the menu, which says "Poems" to get to the poetry archive, and the URL, which is poetry.poetryx.com).

Do I make them both "Poems," change the upper menu item to "Poetry" or "Poetry Archive," or do I just leave them alone, as no one would really be confused?

I don't know - I hadn't considered it at all until I had to type the name of the section that I was working on above and realised that I hadn't really come up with a standard naming or branding convention for the archive, which is a major oversight, admittedly.

See, I try to keep things unified by always referring to site sections, features, etc., by the same names - these "brands" of Poetry X (Brand X?) give the site more cohesion and consistency, which is lacking enough in the world without my having to contribute to the chaos.

So I spent much of the day working on column tests for layouts on several of the site's "entry" or "landing" pages (the home page for each subdirectory - something.poetryx.com).

Of course, whenever I test something I have to make sure it works in all four themes.

So I did a lot of tweaking and revising. I made the "search" icon match the icon themes, I changed the search engine template to validate in XHTML 1.1, and lots of other sundry things that I can't think of right now because I'm really tired.

I edited and added poems by Archibald MacLeish.

I also played around with the menu item placement on the poem display pages.

I think offering people a gazillion choices is the wrong thing to do. So now I'm trying to figure out a way to consolidate choices as much as possible, and to only offer the most relevant choices at any time. Everything will always be available from the drop-down DHTML menus at the top of the page, anyway, but they tuck-away nicely, to avoid clutter.

And there were just an insane amount of icons on the page before. I'm cutting them back, too. Not every choice needs an icon.

Every icon, however, needs a choice.

OR DOES IT???