Well, almost.
As I said in the recent past, the last redesign before this one was created during a bad down spiral – I was very tired and in bad physical shape. Above all else this new redesign I hope is a bit more upbeat.
Its a fairly comprehensive overhaul. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1 and had a think about ways to add value to the site and make it easier for people to find what they need. To that end I’ve totally re-jigged the archives to offer breakdown by date and subject. I’ve also added a (controversial!) Flash RSS Parser that I modified a fair bit from Sam Wan’s RSS Factory. I’m an old-skool Actionscripter so this suited me fine. I’ve also used sIFR for the first time. It was a bit of a fiddle getting the sizes right and its still a bit weird in IE but it works.
Also added is a sidebar of links to relevant articles in the manner of John’s side salad feature. I’ve been daringly naughty here and used a transparent PNG as the div background for this area and (gasp!) used ‘the bad code’ to get it to work in IE – but never fear, all the IE specific code is in a separate CSS file called in conditionally.
For commenter’s I’ve added a spell-checker which isn’t quite functional yet but it just needs a minor tweak from my host works really well.
The big change of course is the fixed | fixed | streeeeetch layout which I have to be honest was a bit intimidating at first but its incredibly liberating – the amount of CSS resizing hacks have plummeted just by utilising this style of layout.
As to the design, I wanted something friendly (hence the vector styles and nice curvy typeface – Vag in case you were wondering). However, I didn’t want to shy away from the fact autism == difference, hence the (overly literal?) stickmen family.
I’m happy with it overall. It feels much more complete and unified than either of my past two designs. It also feels much more ‘mine’. I learnt a lot doing it and thats the biggest payback I guess.
Stats:
- IE5.* support dropped
- 800px width support dropped
Left Brain Right Brain 
Yum. I love the warm colours. It’s almost making me rethink my pared-down site I was about to release. There’s nothing worse than looking at other peoples work to make you rethink your own.
On your front page, the green bottom right area begins about mid-way down the recommended reading? I don’t know if this is intentional or not. Looks like it might not be? It’s this way in Firefox anyways.
Yeah I know – its because I’m using a partial transparent PNG or Flash with wmode set to transparent as the background for that area (depending on the page you’re on). I hummed and hah-ed for a few days over it and I’m still not 100% convinced but I’ll leave it ‘as is’ for now and se what the consensus is :o)
Gyeeaarrr! Reason number dickity-something to redesign myself. It’s very nice! Like, hm! Nice! The rays on the right aren’t even cheesy, something that happens quite easily with that kind of stuff. Yes: very good.
I like it a lot – nice cool colour scheme for the summer!
Some (constructive) criticism – cos that’s what I’m best at:
– the little people in the background make reading some of the related article links difficult (might be better over on the right?)
– really like all the subtle shades of blue in the content area
– font-size is a little small for my taste, but that’s just me
– bigger gravatars, man!
How is that ‘Average time to read’ figure derived?
Oh, and no live search?! no fixed position comment box?? What sort of redesign do you call this… 😉
@Rob: Yes the ‘cheese’ factor was important to consider – I wanted a Sun effect but in keeping with the idea of diversity I wanted something similar but different if that makes sense.
@Matt: constructive crits are _always_ welcome :o) – the little people problem seems an easy fix if I make the backgrounds solid rather than scaled PNG semi’s.
The ‘average time’ thing is a bit gimmicky isn’t it? I thought at first it would be a good thing for people to know how much time they’d have to commit to reading the post but the more I look at it, the less useful I find it.
Thanks for the feedback so far all :o)
Love the new site kevin. Much warmer and more inviting than your previous. Only slight change i’d make is the header text “left brain/right brain” it’s slightly harder to read as there both blue.
Nice job anyway kevin.
Just thought you should be aware that the main page swf has been published with ‘enable debugging’ turned on. I’m getting a remote debugging pop-up, though I wasn’t able to break your password 😉
Thanks Dave and thanks Alex too – oops ;o)
Very Nice Kevin!
So warm and inviting, makes me want to pull out the grill and have an old style Southern barbecue with those hopeful little flat people 😉
lol! I’m all out of vector burgers – sorry mate ;o) ( and thanks for the kind words – and linky!).
Wow, this looks wonderful, nice and summery. especially when it is dull cloudy and raining
Just letting you know that the Search form routes to /wordpress/index.php?etc instead of the new /wp/index.php?etc. It seems like it does so from most places besides the front page (archives and entry view for sure).
Love the new look that you’ve got! It’s got very warm and pleasing colors, some nice typography, and an excellently executed fixed-fixed-stretch layout.
Rock on.
@Helen: thanks :o)
@B.J. Ouch! Thanks for the heads up ;o) and kind words.
Wow, Kev. Was offline for a couple of days and things have gone crazy over here! Love the new design, and the attention to detail. I think you can safely take a few months of rest before the next inevitable redesign.
Thanks Prabhath – a few months off sounds good to me ;o)
I loved the last 2 incarnations but with this third one you’re just spoiling us…
lol Martin – I now crown myself the Ferrero Rocher of web design ;o)
I like it a lot – blues do it for me any day 😉
Yup Noetic – blue’s a very ‘safe’ colour for screen based design. And a bit nicer on the eyes than sludge brown!
Overall, fantastic. definitely a breath of fresh air over the last one. Not that it was bad, but it’s obvious there’s more feeling behind this one. Bonus for making WordPress look like anything but.
Thanks Mike, I do feel much happier about this one.