I’m so excited to finally have a website with cohesive (and coherent!) design from top to bottom. It was very easy to get lost on my old HTML-based site, as I just added on new sections over the years, often forgetting to link back or leave “breadcrumbs” so people could find their way home! Thanks to the excellent work of rzen designs, you’ll now have a much more pleasant and more interactive browsing experience. I hope you enjoy it!

To help you get oriented to the new site structure, let me give you a little tour of the functions and features of the new sensibility.com.

The most obvious and easiest way to navigate around the entire site is to use the menu bar at the top. There you see all the sections of the site at a glance. Some sections have sub-categories that will appear when you move your mouse over them to select an option. For instance, if you mouse over “Patterns,” the menu will unfold to reveal all the eras from which you can select:

Below the top blog post and logo is the “slider,” which is another way to jump quickly to a particular pattern era or to eBooks and Dollar Downloads. The arrows will allow you to scroll through all the available sections:

Scroll below the slider, and you’ll find four sections containing the most recent posts in four categories (for the most recent Show and Tell photos, check the little photo gallery in the footer).

Once you’ve used the menu bar, the slider, or the post summaries to navigate into a particular section, you can glance over to the right-hand sidebar, where you will see a little drop-down menu under “Categories,” which contains all the sections and their subpages in one long, nested list.

This little tool makes it easy for you to jump into a different section without having to mouse over all the menu options in the top bar.

If you’ve navigated to any of the eras under “Patterns,” you will see a list of all the products available in that category. Each product has a summary box like the one you see below:

Pattern summaries include a featured image, basic pattern information, the price, and the add-to-cart buttons for paper and ePatterns. If you already know the details about a particular pattern, you can use this shortcut to place an order. If you need further information or want to see more photos, click on the “Learn more” link, which will pull up the full page for that particular pattern.

At the top of the page you will see a photo gallery containing images for the pattern:

Clicking on the image will advance to the next photo in the lineup. Clicking “enlarge” will pull up the full-sized picture in a special window. The slider below the top image allows you to quickly skim through all the photos in the gallery to choose a particular one to view if you prefer.

Purchasing a pattern, ePattern, or eBook is very simple. Just click the appropriate button to add the desired product to your shopping cart. If a pattern has a supplement for larger sizes, there will be a separate button to purchase it, listed below the paper pattern and ePattern buttons.

You can click a link in your cart to continue shopping until you have everything you’d like to purchase and are ready to checkout. You can view your cart at any time by clicking the “View Cart” button in the upper right-hand sidebar.

Customer Show and Tell, Vintage Images, Sewing Tips, and more blog-style entries are all fully integrated into this new site–no more hunting around for odd sections scattered here and there! As with the pattern eras, you can view a page full of summaries with a single featured image or click the “Read More and Discuss” link to see the full post. Comments are now enabled throughout the site so you can post about someone’s featured creation, leave a note on a vintage image, or ask a question about a particular sewing tip. The comment form link is at the bottom of each summary and at the top of each full post:

Some sections of the site (like Show and Tell) have dozens of pages of posts. You can easily navigate through these in several ways. The first is to simply click from one page to the next (or jump to a page much further in) by using the page navigation links at the bottom of the section (see image below), which takes you through all the posts in reverse chronological order.

The second way will help you narrow down what you’re looking for through the use of keyword tags. You’ll notice a list of keywords at the bottom of each post (expanded view rather than summary view). So, for instance, if you’re in a post that features a wedding gown, and you want to see more wedding gowns, simply click the “wedding” keyword tag, and all posts with that tag will be displayed in a list of results.

There are keyword tags for everything from individual eras to specific types of clothing (like blouses or ballgowns).

Thirdly, if you want to search for a particular term or item on the site, you can use the search box at the very bottom of each page, typing in what you’d like to find and clicking the magnifying glass:

Want to contribute your own photos for the Show and Tell section? Simply click the link in the right-hand sidebar while inside the Show and Tell section:

This will take you to the photo upload form, which makes it easy to submit pictures and text to share your own sewing adventures with my patterns!

Finally, located at the bottom of each page are quick links to subscribe to our feed, find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or watch us on YouTube:

These tools should give you everything you need to navigate sensibility.com. If you have questions about particular products or posts, be sure to visit the FAQs, which are now hosted on-site and nicely organized:

Don’t see an answer to your question? Simply click the link on the FAQs page to submit it through the contact form! If you need information about an order recently placed or about shipping options, drop a line Heather in Order Fulfillment through the Shipping/Order Info page.

If you’re a longtime visitor, I hope you enjoy learning the ropes of the “new, improved” sensibility.com. If you’re just finding us for the first time, welcome! I hope you find lots to delight you. Welcome!