Ask Paul: February 28 (premium)

Happy Friday! Here's a quick update on this week's site update, in addition to another great set of reader questions.
???? Quick update on the site update
I'd been meaning to update the site header, at the very least, for a while. Like a long while, maybe as long as a year. But owning this business has been a painful reminder and/or example of that adage about system admins and IT pros always having to be reactive while wanting to be proactive. That is, life always gets in the way. Not my personal life, usually, but just everyday work things that I was sheltered from for most of my career. Things that need attention, are usually a surprise, and an unwelcome one, and are almost daily occurrences. All I want to do is write. But there's a business and it needs attention, and I hate it.

Anyway, this is just mostly an excuse, not a reason. As I writer, I've settled into a long-term rhythm of sorts, and I don't like the wrenches that get in the way of that. This is tied to the AI conversation below, as well. I just do the things I do, the way I do them. But I can't many days, and it gets frustrating. I'll get there. Or I won't. I don't know.

Getting finally to the point, I had wanted to update the header for a long time. I've liked the Thurrott.com home page since I saw the first design, probably a bit over three years ago, but it was also sort of done without a lot of my involvement. And there are things I would do differently. And can, now that it's my site. I just haven't. And now I finally am. This will occur in phases, but starting with the home page made sense to me. And in looking at the site header, and thinking about what I wanted to promote up-top, it occurred that there was more to do, perhaps.

Some of this is perhaps personal preference, but basically tightening up the white space, which has its place but was I think a bit too much. The home page is constructed of blocks, and so this was basically about reducing the height of things, both inside and between those blocks. Make the header less tall, for example, while also adding some obvious links to related things in a colorful, button/icon-like way.

When I finally got started on this, Robert, the genius I am so lucky to know and work with on the backend site tech, wanted me to be as specific as possible. And so I sent him an itemized list with mock-up graphics for him and his team to work off of. Here's a shortened version of that.
Site header
Bigger "T" logo and Thurrott logo, Thinner (less tall) and wider search bar, Icons for Premium, Thurrott YouTube channel, the Windows Intelligence newsletter, and Eternal Spring. Remove the "Contact" and "About Thurrott.com" text links. Remove name next to the user avatar image. (I joked that the person signing in to the site knows who they are, and this is just taking up space.)

My first pass was just to use Office icons to show roughly the layout I was considering.

And then this.

Among the issues there, we ne...

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