In My Unending Quest

15 Sep

To turn the web purple (must be a phase) I’d like to introduce you to my latest redesign. Lets face it, the site needed it. It was getting just a tad ramshackle around the edges.

Where the old design was heavy on colour, this goes back to my more minimalist roots. I’ve ditched SIFR in place of dynamically generating images for headings on the server. I’ve made sure shorter blog entries don’t look like crap, the underlying code is tighter and more robust and generally its all a bit spick and span.

The biggest change was upgrading from my creaky WordPress 1.5 admin engine to this sleek lovely WordPress 2.0 admin engine. Its a big improvement and was really the main reason this whole redesign was done. Thought I might as well tart up the whole thing.

For those of you with the new Windows Vista default font sets installed you should be seeing them. For those visiting in Firefox, Moz and Safari, things are golden. For those visiting in IE6 and 7 there are minor layout issues with the right column. Same for Opera. If this was a clients site, it wouldn’t be OK to leave these things unaddressed. But its not. And frankly, I can’t be bothered :o)

Have a dig around, let me know if anything’s broken.

16 Responses to “In My Unending Quest”

  1. rutty September 15, 2006 at 12:56 #

    It looks great Kev! Really like the colour and simplicity of it all.

    Couple of problems I can see with FF 1.5.0.7. The justification is a bit wayward on the right column. 04/05 has slipped over the line to the left a bit and the 03 entries are partially indented (first three) and the rest are aligned fully left. Actually, I’m typing this on a laptop and the more I type the better the alignment gets. I think the shorter entries might be an issue.

    Still, it looks great! It’s almost like you know what you’re doing 😉

    Oh, and the spell-checker is US-English. It doesn’t know the proper spelling of “colour”

  2. Matthew Pennell September 15, 2006 at 14:23 #

    Nice, like it a lot!

    The last few entries on the blogroll are moving about a bit (FF1.5, Mac), presumably due to the increasing height of the Comment Preview DIV, and the right-hand end of the curvy purple heading seems a bit jaggy.

  3. M September 15, 2006 at 15:18 #

    Would ‘I fear change’ be an appropriate comment now?

    Bit of the old right column jiggling here in Firefox too. Not that I’m bothered. If it hadn’t jiggled I’d’ve assumed it was a design statement. Oooh! It indents the link list as I type.

    Is good. I like purple.

  4. Do'C September 15, 2006 at 15:36 #

    Hi Kevin,

    I think it looks great. The current posts and comments section is great, and I really do like the overall clean design. I have to admit, the hub design has grown on me as well. The only drawback I see is a width greater than 1024? (but that could just be me and my econonmy going with the least expensive (1024×768 native) flat panels. This theme is very usable.

  5. natalia September 15, 2006 at 15:36 #

    purple is nice. (see link)
    i like the family logo, too. very classy.

  6. KChew September 15, 2006 at 16:29 #

    Streamlined—very nice.

  7. natalia September 15, 2006 at 16:31 #

    PS: I am looking at this from Flock and everything seems to work fine. You missed Flock, which is a lovely browser and is currently in very functional Beta.

  8. Dave Seidel September 15, 2006 at 16:44 #

    Very nice, Kev. Looks great in Firefox, and loads faster as well.

  9. bonni September 15, 2006 at 17:20 #

    I like minimalist. 🙂

  10. laurentius-rex September 15, 2006 at 19:12 #

    Well speak for yourself.

    I have a certain “look” if you can call it that for my web site which has remained that way for years, and that is pretty much my signature as much as any of my “art” is. You might say I have not moved with the times but the majority of websites I think are not so much designed as conventionalised into a narrow paradigm of what the gurus say ought to be and I say ought never to have been.

  11. Kev September 16, 2006 at 06:50 #

    Thanks for the comments and feedback all. I’ve been notified about one bug in Firefox for the Mac which is very frustrating but other than that it seems fairly stable.

    Larry – interesting points but design is about more than achieving a look. That’s called visual style. Design (on the web) is the process of managing the flow of various types of information and ensuring its usable and accessible.

  12. laurentius-rexx September 16, 2006 at 09:18 #

    Well as it happens my site is designed with a certain navigability in mind and the visual style is integral with that.

    I have the complexity of it all mapped in my mind.
    Anyway the visual is my primary medium, hence all the photographs.

  13. Estee September 16, 2006 at 14:53 #

    Looks great…it takes me a while to get used to this, though. I find that changing blog sites is like someone getting a face lift. It was your “persona” I guess.

    So hi new Kev!

  14. Prabhath September 19, 2006 at 14:29 #

    Wow, a beauty! Sorry I’m late on this – my rss reader was on vacation 🙂

    I loved the previous design, yet I really like the simplicity of this too. Purple ftw!

  15. Kev September 19, 2006 at 16:31 #

    Thanks Prab :o)
    Purple – its the new black don’t you know ;o)

  16. David N. Andrews MEd (Dec 2006) September 24, 2006 at 22:56 #

    I just hope it doesn’t become another heather mixture….. :/

    😉

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