Design changes coming up
March 13, 2008
You know, I really intended to keep this design for a long time but it’s not working for me on a strategic level. Oh, it looks compelling. But things I think are very important are getting short shrift.
Here are some of the faults I see with the existing design:
- Too much static space at top. In order to read the newest article you probably have to scroll down a bit. The imagery is compelling but it’s too much.
- Responses are pushed far to the bottom. Some of my comment threads recently have been interesting to me and I think would be interesting to other people too. But they’re awfully hard to get to and it’s damn near impossible to spotlight where the active conversations are.
- The design is cramped and too dark. I really wanted one clean column but I made that column too narrow and the background too dark. As a result my own weblog design makes me feel claustrophobic.
Those are the problems I see; if you see others please write me a note or a comment.
Wordpress 2.5 is supposed to be released soon so I’m going to hold off on making changes. And I have some strategies in mind for dealing with the others. The one thing that’s really bugging me? How can I keep that ship…
Posted in Diary
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March 14th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
How can I keep that ship?
What I’m kind of picturing is… probably easier to do than describe, but I don’t have good image editing software so you get to deal with words. Basically - either slightly shrink the “Thudfactor” title text or enlarge the picture so the text fits into the sky of the picture. There’s a big expanse of blue there above the ship and coastline that is basically dead space. I’d say maybe stretch the picture so it fills screen width then scale the text appropriately.
Maybe fade or transparentize the picture a little and put the About/Updates/Etc text, in light font, across the dark bottom of the picture - the part that’s obscured by the parchment arch in this version?
Not sure how you can put everything interesting at the top and still have only one column. Most of the blogs I read regularly use a multi-column design with the main column being maybe 65-75% of screenwidth and a smaller width, smaller font column with blogroll or recent comments or annoying google-ads or whatever.