"Let life enchant you again." - Fernando Gros
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Blog // Thoughts
October 28, 2009

What’s With The Crayons?

Anyone who still visits this site directly (as opposed to just reading via an RSS feed, which is cool by me), will have noticed that there have been a lot of minor aesthetic changes going on. Partly this is because the current layout was starting to feel a little tired and cluttered. I’m using the […]

Anyone who still visits this site directly (as opposed to just reading via an RSS feed, which is cool by me), will have noticed that there have been a lot of minor aesthetic changes going on.

Partly this is because the current layout was starting to feel a little tired and cluttered. I’m using the Atahualpa theme for WordPress, which is really handy for fast control of the components of a blog layout. But, things are just a little too blocky and colourless right now. So, expect more changes over the coming weeks and maybe even the odd moment of crazyness, as I work towards a better design.

But, there’s something deeper going on. Since the summer I’ve felt that this site, as a blog has been improving. As I look forward over the coming months there are some pretty exciting developments and I’m happy to be a position to blog about them. Apart from some aesthetic concerns, this site – as a blog – doesn’t worry me right now.

However, this site as a showcase, or digital portfolio, is a problem. I need www.fernandogros.com to be more than just a blog. The site needs to work better as a portal for music and clips. I’ve come to realise that blogging clips, studio experiences and lessons might be cool, but for the casual visitor it doesn’t work – at least not the way I’m doing it now. I pull content from Flickr on the sidebars and have a little gallery on one of the pages, but as a digital portfolio of my images, the site is not great either. Same could be said of how the site showcases my studio work.

So, I’m working on a list of things I need the site to show visitors more easily and effectively and looking for good examples on the web of people doing this sort of thing. If you have any cool examples, please send them my way.

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Responses
Toni 14 years ago

Hi Fern – there’s one thing you could do that would improve the photo-experience of visitors: stop using flickr. Sometimes it’s bearable, but mostly it’s so slow that I won’t normally follow up photos that I know are being displayed from flickr because I haven’t got the patience. I’m probably missing out, but y’know, it’s too much hassle except where a blogger I know specifically requests I look at their images.

Flickr has improved a bit over the years, but compared to some of the other free services out there, still seems painfully slow.

Toni 14 years ago

Nice work with the crayons. This looks cool on my winbox, although we’ll have to see how it fares on the Mac (Mac displays haven’t always coped well with light fonts on dark backgrounds *for my eyes*).

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