Notes on the redesign
As you can see the site has gone back up, and with it comes a new look. The old design was up for about a year, and over that time I began to grow a bit tired of it. It worked well enough for the most part, but I thought it could be better. So, a few weeks ago I started hacking up the new design, the results of which you can now see.
The New Design
At first I didn’t really have any clear goals of what I wanted to do with the new design. When I did the last design I started with a mockup in The Gimp, did the html and css to match, and finally transferred everything over to Textpattern. I originally started doing the redesign the same way, but when I drew up some early ideas I wasn’t really satisfied with any of them. I also didn’t want to invest all of the time simply turning my mockups into a working website.
With that in mind, I decided to go ahead and install Textpattern locally on my own PC and do everything straight from there. I finally came up with a concrete goal to make the redesign simple and less cluttered. The first really useful I came up with ended bieng the navigation system where every article’s section, permlink, category, date, etc. are all highlighted to help show where it exists in the entire hierarchy of other posts. At first I couldn’t figure out a way to accomplish this easily with Textpattern, but eventually by using the new variable tags that came out with 4.0.7 I managed to make it work.
After figuring that out I concentrated on making the Typography stand well on its own, since at this point I wasn’t planning on doing much with any images or graphics. I toned down the contrast from plain black on white to enhance readability while also trying as best as I could to maintain a vertical rhythm (as talked about here, here, and here). Although it breaks down in some spots like the navigation section, in most places it is maintained.
Finally I began using columns to organize everything, and after those were implemented everything kind of fell into place. After placing all of the elements where I wanted them I didn’t really feel the need to add much else.
So as you can see here is the result. I think that despite having about the same amount of information as before it is presented much better, and that I accomplished the goal of making everything simpler. At the very least I prefer it to the old design, and it should provide an extra incentive for me to post more often.