Redesigned
Well, this is my latest version of Tales of a Designer. As mentioned before, I had been planning on using my [normally non-existent] free time as effectively as possible to design something new. There were a few things that I started to dislike about my old design that I wanted to address in this design.
One of those issues was the length of blog posts that I wrote. There have been many times that I didn’t have much to say, and just chose not to write it because my design would not look right with just a small block of text and the lengthy sidebar. So I wanted to change that and setup a platform in where the design would not suffer if I wanted to write a quick thought.
The one downside to this redesign is that my distractions are now moved towards the bottom, which first time viewers can’t see at first glance, they have to scroll. The plus side to moving them down, is that I can bring more content to the front page without distracting from the main content, and be able to integrate a quick way to glance at my recent posts, tags, and search the site. It also is a huge plus that you don’t have to reload the page to get those quick glances, so I think the pro’s outweigh the cons.
Another thing I wanted to do was make it more noticeable where you could subscribe. I have no idea what I was thinking on my last design, but I didn’t use the typical RSS icon in the interface. Aside from that, it was squeezed between the 9rules logo, and my distractions, so it was getting lost. Now it’s very noticeable.
Taking a page from a colleagues book, I wanted to bring in more icons to associate with the actions/text they were referring to. Most of the icons are the Silk Icons, and one (in the comments) from the Tower Grove set on Icon Buffet. Icons add much value to an interface, so I wanted to take advantage of that.
Under the hood, I’ve stuck with Wordpress, because I still love it and find new challenges each time I’m building a new site. There were only two new plugins that I used for this version of my design. One being Smart Archives, to give a clean look to my archives page. The other is iWPhone, which formats blogs for iPhones and iPod Touches. Very cool plugin.
There are still a few things that I need to touch up in the code and design, and I’m not 100% sure that the homepage is final, but it’s close. I also need to do a bit of IE testing as well, but for the most part, this will be the new look for 2008. I hope you like it! And please let me know if you find any bugs.