Welcome to the freshly updated You Grow Girl website!

You’ll notice right away that the design has changed. Other than colour, pattern, and layout changes the most obvious difference is the way the posts appear on the homepage. They now appear as full posts — you will only need to click through to the permanent page if you want to add a comment. Yay!

[Update: I have since changed this so that long, image-heavy posts do cut off after a certain point so that we can keep the index page loading quickly. We’ve also reduce the number of posts showing on the index page to help that along. It should load much faster now than it was.]

Speaking of comments, you can now add an image via Gravatar.com. My comments appear in a different colour, which should make it easier to spot when I am responding to a question.

Another new addition are tags as a third level of archiving and searching the site. The bad news is that there is ten plus years of content to tag and additional old-school articles that we haven’t had a chance to reintroduce to the site. And I’m developing a repetitive stress condition in my right arm from the incessant clicking and typing. So for the time being, searching by tags will be incomplete. On the plus side of things, it’s so much easier to find relevant information! To recap, you can now use the search bar, the top navigation bar, categories, and tags to access information.

At the top of each page, you’ll notice a link to the newly improved archives page. The contents of the site can be accessed via that page and is arranged by date, category, and tag. So much easier!

What else is new? The About page is all new and includes a short piece about my gardening background and a quick tour of my gardens. It also includes links to posts that cover these topics. You can now search the site by garden, although there is probably still some older content that needs to be properly archived.

I’m currently working on a Resources page. It’s still in progress, but I’ve added quite a bit to it thus far so you can get the idea. Basically, it’s an updated version of a very, very old page that was embarrassingly out-of-date. It also acts as an FAQ of sorts, answering some of the common questions I receive via email about the products I use.

Another feature I love is the “hardworking” footer at the bottom of ever page. Now you can follow my Flickr updates and inane ramblings on Twitter via the site. Ummm…. yay?

The Forums have also experienced a major technical overhaul but we are still working on the visual face-lift. This is where we expect to see the most growing pains over the coming days. Please bear with us as we work through the kinks. You’ll notice the header has been changed to “Talk” in the upper navigation bar.