I can not even begin to tell you how much I love design work!

In honor of Mind Unbound's new, more focused direction, I'm redesigning the website to highlight the services we provide to writers and authors.

We help with developing book ideas, writing book proposals, querying agents, and promoting & selling books in the marketplace. We also help writers to package their words by providing graphic design services for websites, blogs and newsletters. We even design book covers!

At the moment, I'm wrapped up in designing and building our own website, and I'm loving every minute of it. I'm including a few "screen shots" of some of the pages that are currently under construction. That first one on the top left is the splash page that will welcome visitors to the site.

Much like a book cover, the splash page should be an attention grabber.

This next page here will be the first page of the "company overview" section. It will include some brief text (not written yet, as you can see) and will link to the other pages in the section.

In a large site, navigation is always an exciting challenge. You want the pages to be accessible quickly, but you don't want to take up too much page "real estate" with complex navigation schemes.

That's one reason I usually stay away from sidebar-based navigation. A blog is one thing, but on a regular website, navigation in a sidebar can leave lots of wasted space below the navigation links. Unless you have something else to use that sidebar for, I'd recommend either "floating" a navigation layer so that the rest of the page can wrap around beneath it... or simply using a left-to-right navigation scheme as I have on the new site.

Another thing I enjoy about design is the challenge of creating a common "look and feel" for a site that is flexible enough to vary as needed.

Notice, for example, how I moved the main Mind Unbound text from the top of the splash page to the bottom of the information pages. I started out with it on the top, but in the information pages, the big blue bar over the white page made everything "top heavy," and when I made the bar smaller, the title didn't look right anymore.

I played with the title size for a while, but ultimately I kept the nice big "splash" feel of the title and just moved it to the bottom against the white background. It keeps the brand prominent without creating the feeling that it's in the way.

Which leads me to my final comment on design for the day... the key to design, as in so many places in life, is to give it the time it needs. You can't rush the kind of creative play that leads to genuine breakthroughs. I must have played with that silly title layout for a couple of hours. I still wasn't happy with it, so I took a short break and when I came back, I finally tried moving it to the bottom.

Bam! That was the key. But I needed time to play and then a little time off to see it. Sometimes slowing down is the only way to hit that "Aha!" moment.