Archive | Blogging RSS feed for this section

This Is What Exhaustion Does

11 May

Call me flighty, call me unsettled but as of next week I’ll be redesigning this blog. Again. Again again. For the third time in a month.

Why? Lots of reasons.

Firstly, I realised that the last 2 incarnations of this blog suffered from something that the previous pink one – which got me nods from CSSVault and CSS Beauty – did not, they were designed by a very tired and approaching burnt out designer.

Truth be told, I never realised until I signed up for the CSSReboot just how much of a physical activity design was. Thats when I realised that being permanantely tired thanks to a daughter that thrives on lack of sleep and being overweight and being in the middle of a major design and content overhaul at my workplace had had an effect on both my ability to be creative and my ability to execute good design.

I don’t hate this design but boy is it drab. Its tired and reflects how I felt designing it. However in the last 4 weeks Megans sleep pattern is more stable, the work website is just about done and I’ve lost nearly a stone and a half in weight and switched to a high fruit/protein diet and feel much better for it.

I’m also totally knocked out by the sheer quality of recent redesigns from various others and want to bring this site up to scratch with a more vibrant design.

So – redesign number 3 will be underway in a little over a week!

Spam: On The Wane?

3 May

Is it just me or has the unremitting flood of spam, um, remitted?

I’m aware that as the proud user of one the worlds leading CMS’ I have a plethora of excellent spam fighting hacks, plug-ins and built in tools at my disposal – from centrally managed blacklists through to advanced comment moderation and server configuration tools but even so, it does seem slightly quiet on the western front.

I’m used to the odd one or two slipping through the net – where a particularly dedicated spammer has visited me in person to negotiate Gatekeeper or they’ve added my Gatekeeper keys to some evil spam database cracking system but its been zip, nada, zlich, zero, bupkis, fuck-all.

Anyone else getting this or am I extremely lucky and yet have obviously just jinxed myself?

Cutting Edge – Why?

25 Apr

Like most of us in this line of work/hobby I stop by the four main CSS galleries every few days to see whats new and make the odd comment if I particularly like a design.

I’ve noticed a trend over the last few months on all these sites in a few of the commenters remarking that a showcased site isn’t using ‘cutting edge’ CSS techniques or that there’s nothing new to see aesthetically and without fail it always puzzles me who is making these comments and why – some of these commenters even say a design isn’t ‘worthy’ of the gallery its been submitted to.

What is the big deal about using cutting edge techniques? Lets not forget that all the designs showcased at these sites are in live production, often serving a commercial purpose. It strikes me as incredibly dangerous to use cutting edge techniques (CSS or otherwise) on clients live sites. The reason these techniques are cutting edge is that they are new, unproven and possibly unstable. The only place I personally would consider utilising cutting edge techniques is on a designated experimentation area. I can’t imagne paying customers being overjoyed to find designs failing due to unstable techniques coming apart in unforseen ways due to lack of testing. Its really very unfair to base judgement on a showcased design on its lack of cutting edge technique – by not using cutting edge technique the designer has proven themselves not only a good designer but also responsible.

And what about all those ‘seen it all before’ comments? What exactly are people unhappy with when they make these comments? If one site is a carbon copy of another then fair enough but if a site merely happens to use a similar information design then I don’t see the issue. One example of this is the amount of complaints that come in when a blog is posted: ‘it just looks like a blog’ is the recurring comment – well no shit, Sherlock – guess what? thats because it is a blog! Blogs are structured the way they are because over time thats how the user goals have shaped the design. At bottom all e-commece sites look pretty much the same too – not aesthetically, but in terms of flow. Why? Because this is how the design of an e-commerce has evolved with the needs of the site user to the fore as oppose to the needs of the site designer to showcase their skillset.

So, does this mean I think all designs should be the same – no way. We need cutting edge technique, we need innovation and we need people to push the boundries but we also need to realise that there is a time and a place to do these things. We also need to realise that a good design is much more than a cutting edge style sheet and lots of graphics.

What sort of site am I talking about? What sort of site is great looking but doesn’t use anything which might impact negatively on user experience – well, John’s recent redesign of Joshuaink is a perfect example. It looks fantastic but at heart, its a very simple, solid blog design. Its beauty is not only skin deep, it goes beyond into the semantics, usability and flow of information. Another is Garrett Dimon’s recent design. In terms of aesthetics its nowhere near the same as Joshuaink but look at the semantics and look at the information flow and its plain to see that what we have here is ‘just another blog’ but just like John’s redesign it has a beauty and style that can be appreciated for what it is – a great design, executed perfectly.

Lets not get caught up in a need to be cutting edge merely for the sake of being cutting edge. Instead lets appreciate good design for what it is. If it doesn’t float your boat then fine but don’t fault a good design merely because its not using cutting edge technique.

Redesign Redux

23 Apr

Whereas the previous design was brash, over-heavy and looked bad in certain situations, hopefully this design is the antithesis of that.

What I hoped to do with this design is bring my content to the fore and improve usability but at the same time create an aesthetic that promoted a feeling of calmness and willingness to continue as well as evoking trust.

The previous design was basically trying too hard. I forgot that the primary role of a blog was not to use every CSS trick in the book and ‘force’ a design on people but rather to make it easy for users to read the content.

To that end the body text is the darkest colour on the screen, I’ve set the ‘skip’ link to be viewable at all times rather than hidden via CSS. Links are unobtrusive rather than disrupting the flow of the content and external links are all shown and grouped better rather than hiding some away.

The ‘suggest’ feature whilst a nifty trick was hardly used so I’ve dropped that – it made me uncomfortable that it invalidated the markup anyway – and behind the scenes I’ve started introducing more categories in order to make finding things easier. Lastly, I’ve also tidied up the comments and reduced them to something less hard on the eyes – I think (hope!) I’ve made better use of Gravatars this time too.

So, thats it. I still couldn’t hang on for the CSS Reboot but I’m happier with this design than I was before. For now anyway ;o)

Change Is Coming

22 Apr

I’ve done a very difficult thing this week – I’ve admitted to myself that this design is poor.

When I set out tor edesign from the pink design I had last time I had two goals: first, to improve the readability and second to have something nice to look at. Its fair to say that I’ve compromised both of those goals.

This design is overdone, swamps the middle of the page and is way, way too heavy on the eyes. It doesn’t scan well on shorter entries and the lack of a footer makes the whole page unbalanced. I concentrated so much on grandstanding that I forgot a few of the fundemental rules of design. I designed solely for me.

In a way I’m glad I made this live before the CSS Reboot because it certainly wouldn’t grace that competition. I’m not fishing for compliments at all here but clarity after the fact is all too easy and clarity when designing for onesself is never easy to come by.

I have to view this as a learning process and so I’ll be redesigning this blog as much as I can over the next few days. In a way, it’ll tie in nicely to the fact that I’ve just upgraded WordPress to 1.5. Expect something radically different to this design that concentrates on the needs of the user when reading the page, rather than showing all the nifty CSS tricks I’ve learnt.

By the way, if anyone’s having trouble commenting please mail me kevleitchATgmailDOTcom. As I say, I’ve just upgraded and I know at least one person has had trouble adding comments.

Word Press Upgrade

19 Apr

Well, I finally got around to upgrading this blog to WordPress 1.5 after a brief unsuccessful dalliance with Textpattern.

A few things are broken depending on how well a particular plugin does or doesn’t work with the upgrade and category listings are screwed but other than that its was pretty smooth and easy.

Redesign for 2005 With Apologies to CSSReboot

31 Mar

OK, so I’m really impatient. I signed up for the CSSReboot and here I am launching very, very early. Sorry Adam.

Anyway, some notes from the design process as well as my aims for this design.

Continuing the theme of strong warm colours (the previous design was pink for those that never saw it), I decided to go for a very warm deep red with this colour scheme. My job requires me to design very pared-down sites so I like to be a tad exuberant with my personal designs.

Again I have to ensure in all commercial designs I do that the site is totally cross browser compatible (cough IE cough) so thats what I do. However, I’m getting so fed up with dropping in hacks to cater for some browsers (cough IE cough) that I’m growing increasingly uncaring about how my personal sites look in browsers that can’t adhere to standards. Hence I’ve made an effort to ensure the site works for web standards and then put in generic hacks for IE. I suspect the design might jitter slightly in IE5.* for both Win/Mac and I have no idea how it looks in Camino at all. I took at screenie from iCapture for Safari and it looks OK. Not spot on but workable.

This design sees a major semantic overhaul. I’m finally reasonably happy with the underlying code of the site and think I’m now in a situation where a redesign means a CSS overhaul only. Its also the first time I’ve structured my CSS files in such a rigid way (including using conditional statements for IE based CSS) and I think its definitely paid dividends for me in terms of time and cleanliness of code.

My DTD says I’m going for XHTML 1.0 Strict and baring one design element the design meets that criteria. The one area it fails on is the Search suggest tool (type into the search box above you to see what this does). It breaks mainly because for the Javascript hooks to work the form requires a name attribute as well as an id. I’m in two minds as to whether to keep this feature or not. If it gets used a lot I’ll keep it. If it doesn’t I’ll drop it. I’m trying to be more accomodating of users with perceptual/cognitive disabilities and this seemed a very helpful and intuitive addition to my site search options. We’ll see I guess.

As well as the Search Suggest tool, I’ve also added a menu switcher to differentiate between internal and external links.

As regards accessibility, the design mets current Priority One (A) checkpoints. It would meet AAA if it werent for the requirement for liquid layouts in Priority 2 (AA). However, as I’ve said in the past, the current WCAG standard is not great at meeting the needs of uses with a learning or perceptual disability and hence I’ve made my design work for a cross section of users rather than for an increasingly archaic accessibility standard. Here’s hoping WCAG 2.0 is better.

I’ve used the UK Governments accesskey convention for all accesskeys on this site.

I toyed with the idea of content negotiation for quite some time but in the end reluctantly decided to not implement it. Using it means I need 100% accurate code and in a site that allows markup in comments I can’t be sure that will always be possible so for now, I’ll stick reluctantly to tag soup.

Newer Entries →