The Octopart Blog Gets A Makeover

We’ve been rolling out a lot of changes on Octopart lately from CAD models to Similar Parts and as you can probably tell, an entirely new blog design and layout.

This new design was born out of more than just a desire to shake things up. The blog has been carefully redesigned to improve organization, navigation, readability, and perhaps most importantly, help us develop new and interesting content.

Let’s take a look at what’s new and different:

Simplified Categories

Before the redesign, categories on our blog were… not very useful. And chances are, you didn’t even know we had them! So we reduced the previously large number of categories down to a far more manageable 4: Analysis, Community, Guides, and News.

Category navagation buttons on the homepage.

• Analysis - Analysis will contain any content pertaining to statistics, trends, opinions, and behind-the-scenes looks into how Octopart works.
• Community - Content from and about members of our community like Interviews, guest blogs, events, designer and product spotlights.
• Guides - Guides are any content pieces that contain how-tos, projects, part selection, engineering and design tips.
• News - All the Octopart news that’s fit to print like Octopart updates and feature releases, hiring, and all other Octopart related news.

Easier to Navigate

When you land on our redesigned blog homepage you’ll be greeted by our new category navigation links, a search bar, and the two top posts (under our snazzy new header graphic, of course). These top posts are not necessarily the most recent posts made to our blog, but rather the content that we think is the most useful and relevant. Often these will be our biggest, most recent product update announcements or special content that we feel deserves some extra attention.

Featured posts on the homepage.

Below the top posts you’ll find the rest of the blog’s content from newest to oldest. Each post preview is labeled with its respective category, making it easier than ever to know what kind of content you’re about to read (You’ll also find these category tags at the top of each post.)

Better Content

As helpful as these category tags are for you the reader, they’re equally as handy for us. By being able to easily sort and navigate these categories we are able to spot holes in our content and see what type of content you enjoy the most. That means we’ll be able to produce more of the pieces that you find genuinely interesting.

We hope you’ll find the new design to be useful and we want to know what you think! Drop us a line at contact@octopart.com to let us know your opinion on the new blog format and how we can improve in the future. And as always, you can sign up for our newsletter here to stay up to date on everything Octopart.