weblog

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About the redesign…

In case you haven’t noticed, I recently redesigned my website. The reason I did so was that my design preferences have changed - I’m now less enamored by the grunge look, being edgy, a little off-center, etc. Of course, my previous design was far from edgy, but it fit into the grunge category, at the expense of cleanliness and readability.

Yeah, I now prefer clean and simple designs that focus on the content (this may be a sign that I’m getting older). This design is not flashy (no Flash to be found, haha) nor is bleeding-edge (it’s not a single-page website with fancy scrolling) . Instead, it has predictable divisions and comfortable margins, in the hope that the content stands out.

Nonetheless, I’ve incorporated a few tweaks that are new. First, it’s powered by ExpressionEngine. You could say I’m following the crowd on this one - noted web designers such as Jason Santa Maria and Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain, not to mention A List Apart use EE to power their websites. Call me a lemming, but EE is excellent, if a little complicated to learn at first.

Secondly, I’m using a CSS Framework to layout my website - it’s BlueTrip. I know, I know, a CSS Framework is such a cop-out (write your own code, you lazy web developer, etc.,) but here’s the thing - I’m a little tired of writing redundant code. I’ve cut my teeth coding a website from the ground-up, and I have to say, I have better things to do with my time. I’m not ashamed to admit that I like the fact that a CSS Framework has a lot of goodies already built in - a hard reset (a la’ Eric Meyer’s Reset) great typography (including smart baselines), a print stylesheet, and a grid layout, of course. Go ahead - add “showgrid” to any container class, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Lastly, I’ve experimented with CSS Sprites. The services icons on my homepage are really one image being applied four different ways by the style sheet - this means that one http request is needed instead of four. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Roll all these changes up and my website now looks pretty good across platforms and browsers, not the mention the mobile crowd (iPhone and G1). Perhaps a mobile-specific solution will appear later (mobifyme.com). Nonetheless, I feel pretty good about what I crafted so far. Sure, it’s a work-in-progress, as all redesign are, but I hope it makes a good impression on you too.       

Posted by Jesse on 10/04 at 02:06 AM

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