Blog IA and the redesign
This weekend is "Fall Break" for Cornell students and (hopefully) I will be working on a new design for this site as well as some others that are in need of it. There's christianmontoya.net which I intend to be a sort of portal page for all my domains, subdomains, and social-networking-site-accounts (think bryanveloso.com but with a little more information). Then there is Foxy's site which has some graphics in the works. There is also I Have Senioritis, my portfolio, Foxy's guestblock, Guava Studio, etc. etc. etc… I really wish I had more time to take care of these things.
The big one, though, and probably the one that will take the most time (and might not even be done by next week) is the redesign for this site. Something I have been thinking about a lot lately is information architecture for blogs, and ever since I started this one I have been testing different ideas in my attempts to maximize the effectiveness of various design and layout techniques in connecting my visitors with my content. I know for a fact that the placement of various elements of my pages, such as the feed link, search box, navigation, comments links, and footer content cannot be arbitrary, especially when I want visitors to click on certain things (and not their back buttons). There are also things I want to add, remove, and change on my site, and I need a new design that will facilitate these changes. Plus, this design is not as easy on the reading eye as I would like it to be, and for a blog, readability is key.
I've been mocking up wireframes for my new design in my spare time (just as I did for this design). These wireframes are basically sketches of the elements of my site without any visual styling; a page with little boxes that describes where everything goes. I have also been thinking about the structure of content for very specific cases, such as excerpts on the frontpage, individual post pages, comments sections, and the content of my sidebar and footer. I have been brewing some ideas in my head (mmm, brewing) ever since I gave that lecture on C.R.A.P. in design, and my goal is to make the new design of this site a successful one, not in terms of pretty pictures or flashy effects, but in terms of the specific placement of content and the overall structure. Since I can't make art and I'm not good with effects, I think that's a good goal for myself.
So it's reasonable to say that you can expect some hiccups in my design over the weekend. I'm not planning on doing a live redesign like I have in the past, but I might implement a couple versions of my new design before the final one is up. It's all a matter of how much time I can actually devote to this between now and the end of Fall Break, and whether or not I can finish my very very difficult homework assignment which is due tomorrow. I hate homework.
Incredible redesign! I'm gonna surf your site to check out the details…
PS: You finally succumbed to dark-on-light.
Wow, you might be the first to have seen it. I'm going to write about it soon, should have a new post up by the end of the day. Enjoy!
Wowee. This is such a breath of fresh air for your site. I like it!
And you got it together so quickly.
Kudos!
(I'm guessing you will not be entering this in CSS Reboot now?)
Looks great Christian, love the icons and the graphics. Your feed is linking to your sandbox subdomain so I got a look at it while you were finishing up today.
Hmmm, don't know why my feed was linking to my sandbox…
I'm still bug hunting (aside from the obvious IE bugs) so let me know if stuff isn't working… I can already see that my comments are not getting highlighted like they are supposed to be. Edit: bug fixed!
I think it would be better if you left a little more space after the closing at the bottom, because the content section ends after the foother and there's like 2 px of background visible. Understand what I mean? Or maybe it's just me….
very nice job. your redesign looks great : )