A redesign.
Posted on Apr 24th, at 2008 11:48pmIt was a long time coming, but I finally managed to get my redesigned site up and running last night. The design you see is something I worked on before I came to Japan, but time conspired against me, meaning that I only managed to actually get it finished in the last few days. And if you’ve seen the business cards I’ve been handing out for the past year, the new design might look a little familiar.
The new site indicates a shift in emphasis from a simple weblog, with some additional content tacked on, to a fully fledged home for my things online. It now has a small selection of my web design work, a section for me to upload my music, and a weblog of course.
The colour scheme is an evolution of the long running green theme, which I’ve used for the last five or so years - the palette has become a little more subdued than previous versions, and has been added to with some splashes of orange and navy. Design-wise, I wanted it to feel solid, and mature. Where previous versions relied heavily on images and CSS tomfoolery, I wanted this version to seem a little more understated, which I hope will allow the content to take centre stage. Of course, I couldn’t help but fiddle endlessly with CSS stuff, and that means that for those of you using a recent webkit, or gecko based browser, you’ll see all sorts of nice flourishes which take away the sharp edges you’ll see in something like Internet Explorer. One day text-shadow and border-radius will be universally supported, and we’ll all be able to stop fannying around with images and hacks.
Also worth noting is that I’ve moved away from wordpress completely. I felt it was overkill for my simple needs, and a growing appreciation for tumblr has led me to use the micro-blogging service for this site too. Posts are embedded within the site. I still need to design the actual tumblr blog, but in truth it is acting as little more than a funnel for content appearing n the site itself. I’m not sure tumble was really meant for to be used this way, and it’s less than a perfect solution, but compared to the bloated, spam magnet, memory hogging wordpress, it’s a delight.
There are still things which need fixing - broken links, bad HTML and spelling mistakes no doubt - but in general I’m really quite happy with the way the new site looks. Give me a shout if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
