Published Jul 12, 2003
Now I’ve had this here blog/diary up for nearly two months now, and maybe it was getting a little embarrassing that I was still using the default template provided with every installation of Movable Type, seeing as I’m supposed to be a professional Web designer and all.
See, the concept all along was that I would write, not design, but it’s true the two are linked. I preach this to my clients all the time, really — your look is part of the message that people take away from your site, so make sure you mean the way you look — and maybe it came time for me to swallow some of my own medicine.
The color scheme wasn’t the hard part. When your site’s named after your bird, and your bird is white, several shades of gray, and yellow, well, yer palette’s pretty much picked out for ya. No, the real challenge was of the visual architecture of information on the page, and in particular the main page that everyone will visit most often. Fortunately, organizing information is one skill that I actually have.
So, you’ll find on this page several key elements:- This main entry here, occupying the choice space on the page
- The weblog to the right, a list of links of the moment
- Navigation options, allowing you, my beloved visitor, to browse the site both by date (which is interesting in its own way), and by topic, which holds together a bit better
- Links to my friends, who are interesting and whom you should visit!
And hopefully the visual presentation will draw your eyes to these items in succession and whatnot, and even make you suspect that those of the above items that lay “below the fold” exist despite their initial invisibility.
Of course, even if the design does none of these, I’ll still have succeeded, because this is my site, and this page looks like I wanted it to, so, hey, that’s success. Thbppt!
There’s a few bugs still left; most notably, the blog doesn’t display right in IE/Windows. That’s because my approach was to remove all the space between headlines and paragraphs and so on, then add in new space between entries. IE/Win doesn’t understand how I added in new space (technically, it doesn’t understand adjacent sibling selectors), so it doesn’t add that space in. Thus everything looks all jammed together. Of course, everyone else sees it fine. I’ll probably have to reverse the method I use and just subtract space in specific situations, which will result in IE/Win showing the blog too spaced out (because, again, it won’t understand the selectors I use to subtract space), but I think that’ll be easier to read.
Enjoy your visit! If you have any comments, or catch any more bugs, hey, make a comment!
digging the facelift. you look so much younger, without that plastic surgery “look”… questions: do you stillmean for your comments boxes to remember info? because they don’t. Also, do you mean to have your OTHER stuff (not the blog stuff) to be so far down the page, or as a sidebar? cuz it’s not a sidebar… Also, can you make the default size of the comment box bigger (or the size of the comments section smaller) so the SEND button is all in the window without scrolling?
Love ya babe, glad your feetses are feeling better.
OK, so first of all, the comment fields now remember info. Second of all, they’re on the entry’s page, so the fields can be any size, and I’m keeping them nice and big ‘cause I want them to be welcoming. I want people to post!
As for the sidebar, that’s a good question. It’s not really supposed to be a normal sidebar; nor is it a normal navbar. It’s actually both glommed together. Frankly, I thought that only the main entry merited the “place of honor” on the left, where your eye goes first. Having three columns (main, sidebar, nav), with the widest column first and the other two following it seemed odd. So I ended up with this solution. We’ll see how it grows!