May 26, 2009

Mid 2009 Blog Redesign Part 1

Today I’ve stared tackling some blog redesign tasks. I’ve settled on a new theme, the nicely named Atahualpa theme from Bytes For All. What I like about this theme is the easy customisability. So far, I’ve made the following changes, – new header images – set colour scheme to vaguely Edo-like tones – move fonts […]

– new header images
– set colour scheme to vaguely Edo-like tones
– move fonts to Helvetica family
– install plugins to track twitter, allow comment subscription, adapt for mobile users and show recent comments
– change favicon
– organise sidebars

The layout is far from complete, but I’m pretty happy so far with the direction this is heading.

Tagged Blogging, Creativity, Daily Life

Toni 16 years ago

Looks nice and clear so far, Fern: seems a good change to me.

Matt Stone 16 years ago

Looking good but its too wide for my screen

Mike Mahoney 16 years ago

I really like the new theme (aside from the glaring ommission in your blogroll!) 🙂

Seriously, that last theme with the drop-downs was a tad annoying to me. This is much better. Nice and clean and visually interesting.

It does not seem to be well suited for 1024×768 resolution, though. The right sidebar does not appear unless you scroll over, and some readers may not notice. The comment text box also goes off the screen to the right, making it jump wildly as I type.

On my own blog, 29 percent of my vistors report 1024×768 or less. I’m not sure I’d want to make things that difficult for a big chunk of readers. Your mileage may vary.

Fernando Gros 16 years ago

Thanks for the comments!

Toni – I know you didn’t like the last design. As much as I was a fan of the severity and neatness of it, it did leave out a lot of usability and I really couldn’t meet my goals with it. Thanks for being patient.

Matt – thanks. I’m making some comments below on the width issue.

Mike – it was an omission! I struggle with blogrolls, because I think they serve a good purpose, up to a point. I’ll be making more changes in the next week.

As for the width issue; I do have to check this design out on more systems to see if it is breaking. If this doesn’t work on a 17inch iMac then I will make changes for sure. As for screen resolution, 1024 or less accounts for under 17% of readers here.

At every stage I’ve chosen to err on the side of being too wide; when I went to 800 instead of 680, then 960, then 1024, etc. I’ve never really liked the idea of designing for every machine out there, this is a niche blog, not a newspaper. I’ve intentionally gone superwide and want to stay that way for now, assuming the theme actually works, of course.

Interestingly, the blog looks great on an iPhone.

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