Building the network
The number of sites I have has grown, shrunk, consolidated and grown again over the years. Many of those sites are now confined to the world of web caches. But one thing is clear: I always have more than one running concurrently and I do a very bad job of pushing – or enticing lets say – users from one to the other.
Currently I have this blog, a dedicated portfolio, a paper toy project and a number of different places to buy t-shirts I’ve designed. All these entities get traffic – which is great – but almost no users that visit one site link over and visit another – not great.  So the task: come up with a way to link these sites together.

What is acceptable
I started looking around the web to see ways in which companies and other designers did or didn’t do this.  My eyes extensively scanned the internet for possible solutions and the answer was as clear as coffee – not clear at all.  Some sites present you with a selection task ‘where are you’ or ‘what do you want to do’, others are more explicit and say ‘hey check out our other site(s)’ via nicely designed graphical pulls.  And others use navigation bars that are network centric. So the question remained: which way did *I* want to do this.

Nonrelevant clutter
My main issue with most of the potential solutions is that they would interfere with the content and context of the site they would sit on.  My portfolio focuses on work for a reason, it doesn’t have links to my twitter, news posts or blog content because I want people to be focused on the work, and in most cases only the work.  The blog doesn’t have that problem of course, I’m trying to push people all over the web. I do however want a coherent solution, one that works with all my sites. I’m not just being lazy with this idea either. A solution that works for all, also works for the users interacting with it: they only have to learn the tool once, sites by me become easily recognizable – for better or worse – and they have an easy way to jump between those sites.

Designing the bar
There really was only one solution that would cover all my prerequisites: a network bar. Said solution needed to be unobtrusive, it also needed to be well designed, usable and work with any colour scheme I could throw at it.  The latter left only one real choice, black.  Not really an unobtrusive colour black, but could I make this work…
Take a look at come clips on different colours:

The bar needed a brand, one that is recognizable, not overly distracting, and if at all possible is relevant to me. I tried a number of things that didn’t work or just didn’t sit right with the rest of the page design – it was important not to design in isolation. I ended up going with a simple ‘W’ design, referencing my last name, simple and stylized.
The final result:

Technical implementation
Lets get down some specs here. At the very least the basic functions have to work without JavaScript enabled. Because the bar can’t be cross domain loaded – for security reasons – it’ll have to be small in file size. It should know which site you’re on and disable that link. It should not need to use any files my sites don’t already use. It should also – where possible – add value or services to the page you are one.
Here’s an example of added features I’ve been testing out:

The roll out
Due to the nature of the bar and the potential breakages that could occur to sites already live, I’ve decided to only implement the bar with new versions of the sites I run. Does that mean I’ll have to redesign or tweak my current sites, yes it does. Quite frankly though some of the sites were due a redesign or rework anyway, this site for instance doesn’t really work in many areas, that’s OK though, it’s an evolution.
Expect to see the bar at a Paul West site near you soon!

UPDATE!: You can see the new bar in action on my portfolio site yaypaul.com