CELL*WISE

For anyone who may have visited CELL*WISE in the last week, you probably noticed that I totally changed the template. Actually, to let you know, it wasn't all done until now, so you may have viewed an incomplete version. I will always be updating and improving aspects of this blog, as I learn more and become more experienced, but for now the template is mostly done.

A major improvement was upgrading to a 3-column blog template. When I started this blog about 1 month ago, I just had a 2-column template before, and specifically the template was called Tekka. At first I liked the rather minimalist look of this template and it had some convenient unique features. For those of you who can remember it, I had a slightly different title header image which I created, and I don't even remember what else at this point. The main thing that I started to not like anymore was the 2-column template. Mostly because I had many link categories that kept growing, and the one sidebar I had to work with was getting quite long and looking somewhat disorganized.

Therefore, I now have the new 3-column template, which of course has the large middle column for posts, but also two sidebars on the left and the right. It even has three extra links at the top right of the blog, but I don't know what exactly I will use them for yet, so right now they don't link to anything important.
I like the look of this 3-column template very much now, and the idea was again to try to keep everything clean looking and organized in a somewhat logical way. By having two sidebars, it increases the number of items that the reader can see on their screen in one view.
There are still some little things that I want to change about this template, but I will have to go back into the HTML to fix these when I have more time.
For any readers who may have read my original"Welcome to CELL*WISE" post, the links available on the sidebars haven't changed themselves that much at all, just the look of them.

On the left sidebar, (after the blog description, my profile, and my blog archive) most all links are now within "drop-down menus". First, I even have "Labels for CELL*WISE" within a drop-down menu, because it is expected that this list may grow rather long with time. All of the other link categories within drop down menus should be rather self-explanatory. One thing to note for the link categories of "Biomedical Engineering", "Tissue Engineering", "Stem Cells", "Biomaterials", and "NanoBiotechnology" (which are all specific focus topics for this blog) is that the links contained in these drop down menus are mostly websites of organizations and/or directories that I feel to be the most relevant and prominent to each of these categories.

Oh, I just remembered, I still need to finish the link category "Companies". I have a list of about 50 companies that I need to add in there!

Instead of drop-down menus, I actually really wanted to have hierarchical menus, just like the one that is used for my Blog Archive, but I couldn't figure out how to have those for additional sidebar links lists. If anyone knows how to do this for Blogger Beta, please do leave a comment with any info.

The right sidebar is currently dedicated to the "Newsreel" powered by Google (select different keywords same as before), Ads by Google which are targeted specifically for this blog, and a Google search box. Everyday, I even find at least one very interesting article in the Newsreel, so this is still a great feature for daily news relevant to this blog.

I am sure that I will be adding many more interesting things to each sidebar as I learn more about all the new Blogger features and fun/useful add-ons for blogs. I definitely have plenty of room now!

But now I need to focus on the most important part of this blog - writing my own posts.
Now that all this new template stuff is done, I can finally write on my blog!
And now I'm too tired. I plan to get back into the groove of posting with my own style soon.