Exciting Blog Update! A New (& SUPER Useful) Way to Experience Our Content

As a user of this site as well as the founder/namesake, I was not having the best experience, to be honest. Sure, I loved the actual content we were creating for the blog, but navigating it was such a bother. While I was designing these two houses, I realized how much better of a resource our site could be for anyone in my shoes. As you may know, we produce daily ROBUST design content for every room which includes trends, inspiration, process, renovation, mistakes, reveals and resources. But once they become the “sixth” post on the feed, they disappear onto the dreaded “Older” ether of the site. All that work, often WEEKS of work, for them to maybe show up in a Google search if Google likes us that day (are they listening right now?). Sure, you can find them in the categories on the sidebar but the tagging was messy, and it was a pretty bad user experience for our particular content. I found myself Googling “Emily Henderson wallpaper roundup,” or “Emily Henderson tile roundup” ALL THE TIME, and that’s crazy. So while we want to revamp the whole site, I asked my IT and editorial teams to prioritize their efforts on finding a solution for this; I want to give you (and me) a better design resource and experience. The goal is for if/when you are designing or renovating a particular room that you can really use this site for all your needs and get lost for hours (hopefully) in our informative, well-researched and well-shot content. I found personally that there wasn’t a site that was doing this so easily, with posts as informative as ours and I WANTED IT SO BADLY. These days in digital media, when you see a hole, you try to fill it.

Now, I’m so happy because every post that we felt held a lot of real serviceable value is in our easy-to-navigate “ROOMS” section, which you can find in the site navigation bar above. Thanks to Arlyn, Jess, and Ryann who have spent (literally) MONTHS tagging, updating and organizing (and re-organizing) our best content for this big site update so we can all design, decorate and style our houses with more ease. THANK YOU, guys. There still might be some tweaks here and there as more people start using this and we notice some things work better than others, but we were antsy to finally show you what we’ve been up to.

So now, let’s walk you through how this really looks for you, how to navigate it and where you’ll find what you need/want. It’s all pretty standard…no crazy content curation potions or experience wizardry, but hey, we’re proud of this, so let us show you around anyway, you know…just in case.

First off, anytime you want to get to what we’re about to show you, just head on up to the navigation bar and click “Rooms”. That’ll get you where you want to go (and you want to be here…it’s where all the cool kids are).

We created a landing page with all the rooms you might want some guidance on, from the biggies (living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens) to the not-so-biggies-but-still-great (holidays, laundry rooms, etc.). We even have a “Whole House” section here, which, well, houses all posts that didn’t really belong in a specific room, as well as house tours from non-EHD designers. (If you’re wondering where my portfolio of work went, hang tight…pardon the dust…it’s under construction and a version 2.0 is comin’ at ya in the next few weeks).

Okay, so you’ve picked a room…now what? What are you going to find after that “click”? Pictures of really pretty spaces? Renovation process advice and rules? Trend reports and shopping roundups? Yes, yes, and yes…all organized in a hopefully easy-to-follow-and-find format.

A quick little (kind of “duh moment”) brief on our four categories (again…so proud) and what to expect from each:

Room Reveals: These are any reveals and makeovers we’ve done and shared with you in the past, organized by the room you’ve selected. My old Glendale living room reveal? Brady’s kitchen makeover? All right here.

Trends & Inspiration: If you…need ideas for paint colors and want to know what’s “now”/working on a bathroom and would love some direction on cool materials and finishes/have a completely blank slate and looking for a totally new style to shake things up, this section is for you.

How-To & Process: This is all the nuts and bolts. All the posts we’ve done walking you through the nitty-gritty of renovation, a DIY project, mistakes, space rules and styling live here for your reference.

Shopping: Let me preface this by saying this is not e-commerce. This is where all our posts that have a shopping lean live (any roundup, budget room or post with a Get the Look, for example). Don’t worry, we’ll go a little deeper into this section in just a sec.

But first…

If you’re halfway down the page in bedrooms but find yourself craving some kitchen content, we got you…the “Rooms” sidebar stays with you as you navigate, so you can jump to another space and all the posts that live there with just a click.

Okay, back to shopping…

Again, this is not e-commerce (and as I’m about to get to at the end of this post, we’re launching a totally separate SHOP page in the coming weeks, too, which is going to be a different experience than this…that one is product-based, this is post/content-based). You can either just start scrolling through all those shopping posts in the room you have selected, or you can curate articles even further by post type (Roundups, Budget Rooms, Power Couples, Etsy Finds, Combos) and also by product type (which change depending on what room you’re “in”). So, say you’re in “Bathrooms” and are like “give me all you’ve got about faucets”…just click “Roundups” and “Faucets” and boom…your custom content experience.

So there you have it…all the content that my team and I have worked SO HARD on in the past right there for you, in a way that is hopefully super helpful to consume.

I hope you spend all weekend long deep in the archives, and hey, maybe tell a friend who might also be renovating or decorating. And don’t worry, we are also working on updated pages for the “About” section (which will soon be “Meet the Team”) and “Resources,” which we’re transitioning into a more robust shopping experience (not e-commerce, but just a user-friendly way to see everything we’re loving right now product-wise in a more navigatable form). You might also see the article pages looking a little different soon, as we’re also optimizing those. And then, finally, the homepage—the big blogroll will get tweaked, but not as much as we originally thought, just enough to give you more to look at/consume while not straying too far from the comfortable scrolling format of a blogroll.

Stay tuned folks (meanwhile, go have fun perusing our new ROOMS pages). It’s making our lives as designers so much easier already. xx