You may have noticed that the Codex has a bit of a different look to it this morning (or, actually, as of yesterday). This is part of an effort to pare back the amount of stuff that’s displayed on any given page of the Codex, so that the main article content is more in focus. In particular, I made a point of reworking the sidebar content a bit, so that I could drop one sidebar entirely from the site layout. There will now be (I hope) a right-hand sidebar on all pages of the site, except for certain pages which will be full-width (and will thus have no sidebars).

If you do stumble upon a page with a left-hand sidebar, or two sidebars, please do let me know.

This change also brings Codex Main in line with my design goals for the subdomains, which are (at present) best reflected in the Ultima 9 subdomain’s layout.

I’ll also be re-working the menus visible on the site, and I’ll probably be switching from two menus to just one. As this will likely result in removing a lot of the category links (e.g. Ultima, Ultima Fan Projects, etc.) from the menus, I’ll also be putting together a new navigation page that will direct you to content based on those criteria (and others).

One other area that will be receiving attention is an area that a surprisingly number of people visit: the Fan Project index. Actually, I guess I shouldn’t say that it’s surprising; the Codex, and Aiera before it, is in large part an archive of Ultima fan projects, so it’s good that a number of visitors here are availing themselves of that content. That being said, I’ve never been happy with how individual pages of the index (e.g. the Ultima 6 fan project index) look…especially on mobile. The layout currently in use there is not responsive at all, and gets horribly cluttered on a small screen. So I’ll probably be reworking those pages over the next little while, as well.