Version 3

If you have seen the new design for my site, you probably noticed that it is very different from version 2. If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over.

As much as I liked version 2, there were many changes that had to be made, so many that a completely new design (and new frontend code written by hand from scratch) was necessary. For example, my light-on-dark design, which I did like very much, was not suitable for users reading my blog. I had more than a few readers complain that reading light text on a dark background was not comfortable, and I wasn’t happy about losing them because of my design. I also wanted to add more things to my layout, and I couldn’t just keep dropping things into the sidebar or footer of my previous design. I needed something more compact, built from the ground up for the content I had in mind.

I also had some big goals for my new design, which I hope I have achieved:

• A serious attempt at using C.R.A.P..
• A far better comments section, with a clear separation between pingbacks and comments, alternating colors, and subtle highlighting whenever I’m talking This took the most work, and I can share the code that made it happen if anyone is interested.
• A shorter header section, because I realized there was no point to wasting so much space with “site name, pithy tagline.” I moved my tagline to the title bar, you can see it on the homepage.
• Clean search results, archive pages, and next/previous navigation links.
• Clean excerpt headers, with the category, date, and number of comments tucked nicely underneath.
• Icons everywhere, to make the visual process easier.
• As always, a liquid design… for browsers other than IE 6-.

The design was something that popped into my head sometime in the past few weeks… I pulled together the following elements and stuck with them:

• A tile from my (very) old wallpapers site. At one point I got to thinking, “when did we stop using loud patterns in our web designs?” Sure, they can get really ugly… I tried thinking of a way to use this one, but it wasn’t going to happen. Still, you can leave it to me to do something like this… long live retro web design!
• This palette… because one of the best pieces of web design advice I ever heard was “pick a few colors and stick to them,” and that palette has some nice colors.
• Pixel-sized text… because I’m tired of checking my websites on Linux and seeing all the fonts at weird, inexplicable sizes. I’ve faced the music: pixel sized text is far more reliable than “em’s,” and for users on anything other than IE, it’s not an accessibility issue. (I’m still trying to decide what my new stance is on text-sizing, so don’t rush to quote me on this.) As for those on IE, well, wait a couple months and download IE 7, mkay?
• Dark-on-light, the easy way to read a blog… but not black text, that’s boring.
• Georgia. For some reason, I just knew I wanted this new design to use Georgia… not lame ugly Verdana, silly Trebuchet, or hideous fonts like Times or Arial.

I was also very strict about avoiding all trends as much as possible. I am proud that I can say that to this very day I have never given anything a “glass floor” reflection, and you won’t find any of these other trends around here:

• No fixed width design. I’m kinda proud of how my site scales down to 760 pixels, even if it doesn’t work in IE.
• No Silk Icons. I like them as much as anyone, but when every website across the Interweb has them, as well as every new template released in the past 6 months, well, I figured someone had to try something new, even if just for the sake of being different.
• No beefy footer. It was fun for a while, but I’m starting to question how valuable they are. I’m even willing to think that anything I would put into a beefy footer probably shouldn’t be on the page at all. I still like them a lot, but this new design has no use for it, and I think it’s better off without.
• No light-on-dark… my photoblog is better suited for that look. One of these days I might make a new design with the option to invert the colors, but for now I’ll play it safe with one eye-friendly color set.
• No hover effects… at all! I decided they were getting too commonplace, to the point of “look how cool, stuff is changing,” and I figured it was time for a vacation from hover effects.
• And still, until the end of time, no cheesy “web 2.0″ elements. Stickers and shiny buttons are off-limits to me… after all, if I had them on my site I would probably get bought out by Yahoo or Google, and as much as I could use the money, that’s not the message I’m trying to send.

I officially started this redesign Friday morning, and finished about 4 hours ago, so you could say I rolled this one in 2.5 days. I’m on Wordpress fire. I still have a couple things to do, such as updating the colophon, getting rid of the projects page, and updating my portfolio, but there never seems to be enough time to get everything done. I’ll get around to it… eventually. In the meantime, I have some blogging to catch up with, some Fall Break to enjoy, and some studying to procrastinate on. Share any thoughts you have about this design, bugs you might have found, IE fixes, record theme-rolling times, etc., and stay tuned as I return to my regular blogging schedule.