Today is the first day of the rest of your blog

Jul 12 2004

As yesterday’s entry was a little low on actual information, today’s update will be a full and frank appraisal of the site and my intentions for it.

First of all – the redesign. It took a little over three hours of messing about in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Homesite and Textpattern to end up with this look after some directionless doodling earlier in the day.

Now I’m not going to claim that it’s ground-breaking – it looks like every other blog out there – but having a design I am happy with will go a long way in allowing me to see past the disappointing exterior and concentrate on writing the actual content.

Nodes of design inspiration

The site is (of course) coded in semantic, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS (Note – validation probably doesn’t work due to a combination of Textpattern plugins and minor mistakes), and has been built to allow me to create new designs easily by strictly delimiting page areas:

<container>
     <branding />
     <search />
     <nav-global />
     <content />
     <sidebar>
          <nav-calendar />
          <nav-local />
          <nav-external />
     </sidebar>
     <siteinfo />
</container>

These standard CSS building blocks will hopefully allow me to maintain a ‘skinnable’ site – I plan to introduce stylesheet switching sometime in the future.

The Nodes of Design Inspiration for this design weren’t really conscious decisions, but seem to have ended up:

The tiled background is a grayscaled William Morris wallpaper that I got from here (via).

What does the future hold?

In terms of design, I have several improvements in mind. First is to shorten this enormous homepage by excerpting the latest few articles (see whitespace, FiftyFourEleven) – then I have several articles on the back burner to publish once I have finally got my head around the way Textpattern handles site sections.

I also plan to post more frequently, aiming for a post a day, but on subjects ranging from web design to family life. No more posts about this site, I promise!

Link of the day

I came across the Good Experience Blog today – Mark Hurst’s customer experience site highlights both positive and negative examples of customer experience design. It’s a good read for a broader view of what constitutes good design practice and user-centered principles.

Filed under: The Site, Design.

Digg this article

Bookmark this article with del.icio.us

Previously: An evening's hard work

Next: Not as crap as we used to be


Comments

chuck
2867 days ago
Matt,

I like the new look! thanks for another mention of my site … that’s great!

Isn’t it a great feeling when you get your design out there and can just maintain and write instead of design, redesign, overdesign and pour over code and fix problems?

btw – I’m going to add you to the favo(u)rites section of my site :)

later
#1