I was never very good at working alone without peer feedback. So, I present for your commenting pleasure, the redesign work-in-progress. It still needs lots of detail work, but this is the general layout I’m thinking of starting with. I know I’m violating some cardinal rule of a website redesign by letting you see it way, waaaay before it’s ready for prime-time, but I’d like some comments. And, hell, it’s not like I have a really huge reader base, anyway. We’re all friends here.
FYI, this is a jpeg of a Photoshop comp, originally 1024px wide. The main content area is arranged so that users with 800×600 resolution can still see the entirety of the content. I’m planning to go whole-hog CSS this time, so the partially-opaque backgrounds will actually be DIVs with an opacity setting, not some trickery of background images. The flower background (and likely the color scheme and masthead) will change as the mood strikes me, although whatever image is there will remain fixed as the page scrolls. I’m defenestrating the iFrames. (Look it up.)
I’m not positive I’ll be keeping the TagBoard, as I’m hoping to upgrade web hosting and move to some sort of publishing software that allows comments. However, if I do keep it, you’ll all be glad to know that I’m working on upgrading to TagBoard Advanced. I doubt it’ll be around for the new design, though.
Comments from the peanut gallery are welcome and appreciated.
omg, that’s gorgeous.
and i know what defenestrating means.
you sicko!i could write you a tagboard, if you like. you know my code is usually ugly, but you can beautify it.
i wish i could design. developing is nifty and all, but sometimes i just wish i could create.
always nay-saying! everything i create!
Thanks! I still have to iron out lots and lots of details, but I think that’s the general layout I want to go with. If I end up having space on the front page for a tagboard, I’ll probably take you up on your tagboard offer… I’m planning to go with HostRocket, which supports Perl, PHP, MySQL, and runs on RedHat Linux version 7.3+. Can you write something that will run on that? (Read: I don’t think it supports ASP, but I could be wrong.)
Yeah. . . I really like it. I think it’s especially cool that you will be able to change the background at a whim. Almost as good as redesigning the site when you get bored with it, just alot less work.
Web Goddess that you are, I’m sure that you’ve seen this before, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t share now at such a perfect moment. For those who are too lazy to look up defenestration and are just sitting around wondering what it means:
http://www.fuckinggoogleit.com/
Amy
i could try. i’d like to learn PHP anyway 🙂
bwahahahaha – i so tell people the same thing! the fact that that site exists is hilarious. i need to make http://www.fuckingpingit.com/ – for those times when people are too stupid to ping it.
“sheryl, what’s the IP for X site?” “omg, PING IT.”
Redesigning without a bunch of bullshit — that’s another reason why I’m going to try to do everything in stylesheets, too, including layout. No tables. That way, if I decide that the sidebar needs to go on the left instead of the right on every single damn page, I can just change the placement in the CSS file instead of making Dreamweaver search and replace in the entire site.
This is gonna be cool. Yeah.