By the B. Family
After coming back from our vacations in France, we told you that INside-EXpat was about to change! Now, it’s done and we hope you will enjoy this new version.
In this article, we want to show you what and why we transformed the blog so you won’t be lost and you will understand why the maintenance was so long.
1) Offering you a totally bilingual website
Writing in both french and english langages is a choice that we made month after month as the blog was getting bigger and bigger and also because of our new friendships. Making friends all around the world drives us to be willing to share our experience in an easy and accessible langage, english was the solution.
At the beginning, we thought that surimposing both languages would be the simplest way, but actually it becomes more and more complicated as french and english were awkwardly mixing through articles and menus. Considering the risk of losing the attention of our readers, we prefered to work on building a separate space for each language.
So now you can navigate in French or in English (it’s up to you!) thanks to the little flag situated on the right of the topbar.
Of course, just a few articles have the two versions, because it will require some time before we duplicate the whole blog content, but from today you will be able to read an article without being annoyed by a second language that you don’t want.
2) A clean design to make it easier
Visual identity and unity are clearly essential for us, so we didn’t want to change anything that would radically alter the design of our blog. Enhancing it was possible by choosing some darker secondary colors. It improved the visual organization of the blog, particularly on the home page, in order to facilitate the user navigation.
We also decided to give up on the main slider which was situated on the top of the home page. I really liked it at the beginning but our template dowloaded it at the end, after averyhing else on the page. So it was not a good solution to highlight the articles that seem important for us. But a lot of solutions were possible, so we reorganized the home page to deal with this removal.
3) Highlighting a useful content
This blog celebrated its second birthday last February. At the beginning, we wrote it only for our families and friends to give them news about our expatriation project, it is now readed by a larger audience, including a lot of future expatriate people and travellers. If our relatives were satisfied with a lighter content and personal stories, the others readers look for a quality content, never written before if possible, or at least want an easy access to exhaustive information.
So we add a few things to make your navigation easier and help you to find faster what your are looking for :
– the main menu is accessible easily on the home page and is more obvious thanks to darker color on the background
– we add the titles of this menu on the footer too so you have several ways to find it
– we classified our articles in a more detailed and organized submenu
– we created two guides (Be an expat in the USA and Travel with kids) situated in the sidebar and a selection of popular feature articles
The research box also moved from the topbar to the sidebar, a more usual place… so you won’t waste your time looking for it!
Finally, you can also find easily a lot of different previous articles thanks to :
– “last” and “next” articles arrows at the bottom of each article
– the last posts can be found on the home page as well as in the footer when you are not in the home page
– a random selection of old articles situated in the side bar
We also took the opportunity of all these great changes to update our “About us” page which was not really accurate as we didn’t change it since the end of our expatriation in Singapore, we did the same for the blogroll (which is different in your are on the french or on the english version) or the contact form.
Other improvements will emerge in the coming weeks and months to help you navigate easier and easier on INside-EXpat!
We want to thank you all for your increasing visits and all your kind messages and comments that lead us to make this blog a real source of information and inspiration for you, our readers.
