Hi everyone! I’ve been quietly working on some digital organization while my wife tackles her own projects. Today I want to share the results of a larger rework we finally completed: a streamlined, more browsable Projects page for the blog. Over time our original Projects listing had become unwieldy — hundreds of linked items packed into text made it hard to scan, and it hadn’t been updated in months.
Originally the page used a long list of linked descriptions for each project. That worked fine when there were only a few dozen posts, but as our project count swelled the page turned into a dense block of links. Our last count topped 750 links (with duplicates when projects fit multiple categories), and we expected that number to climb toward 1,000 without some cleanup. So we spent the last few weeks overhauling the system with two main goals: reduce clutter, and make projects easier to browse.
To approach browsing, think of the Projects area like a bookstore: you head to a section that interests you, glance at a few covers, and pick what looks good. If you want a very specific post, the site search is still your fastest option, but the revamped Projects page is now much friendlier for casual exploration.
Paring down was straightforward. We consolidated 26 categories into 16, removing duplicate listings while keeping every project available somewhere. The larger challenge was improving visual navigation. So we added image thumbnails for each project and created individual pages for each category. Those thumbnails act like covers, making it easier to scan through categories and quickly identify projects that catch your eye.
The thumbnail update was labor intensive: we relinked posts and created more than 600 thumbnails by hand to match our template and category structure. A few plugins were tested, but due to our custom setup we ended up coding the thumbnails directly. It took time, but the result is a cleaner, more visually appealing browsing experience that’s easier on the eyes and faster to scan.
Now the main Projects page features a handful of thumbnails for each category so you can get a quick sense of what’s inside. If you want to see everything in a category, click “more” to open that category’s full page. The 16 categories are designed to cover the full range of our posts while making it simpler to find the type of project you want to tackle:
- Most Popular
- Painting
- Decorating
- Furniture Upgrades
- Crafting & Art
- Home Improvement
- Outside
- Cleaning, Organizing & Eco
- Lovey-Dovey
- Money Saving
- Kids & Pets
- Holiday
- Videos
- Projects By Month
We’ll keep these category pages updated every few weeks with the latest projects so the pages remain current. The ordering within each category mixes popular and favorite projects with logical groupings (for example, we kept kitchen and bathroom remodels together). We intentionally avoided strictly chronological order so older favorites wouldn’t be buried at the bottom. The result is a curated, varied list — similar to browsing a bookstore shelf: pull something down, check the thumbnail, and see if you want to read more.
I hope you like the revamp. With the Projects update finished, I can move on to another big organizing task on my to-do list: the basement. I’ll share updates on that soon. In the meantime, what paper or tech organization projects have you tackled lately? Any tips to share, or plans to tackle something this evening?
If you were hoping for a traditional organizing how-to, check out our refreshed Cleaning & Organizing category, which includes dozens of posts on decluttering and system-building.