Tiny re-design
If you are just reading my posts via RSS, now would be a good time to stop by again. I have done some re-designing. The current page layout has been bugging me quite a lot in the past weeks, mainly because of the layout.
At first I liked the “Headline” and “Featured” categories because they gave my blog a look similar to a newsmagazine. While that was all fine, it felt weird to me to blog about small stuff and then put it into the “Headlines”, just because it was the most recent article. I had some other issues with the layout as well: I don’t think anyone ever used the navigation bar in the middle (if you’re thinking ‘There was a nav bar?’ you get my point) and the other content was just too far down to see right away when landing on the page. I hate scrolling to see more, I like to have as much as possible at my fingertips (or at least within eyesight), so that had to go as well. The most annoying thing was that I had to manually change the categories all the time - once a post was no longer the current headline, I had to change it to “Featured” and the oldest post in that category had to be re-labelled as well.
As you can see, that is all gone now. I actually just upgraded to the current “Arthemia” theme and changed the code a little to accommodate my needs. I still haven’t figured out how to kill the drop down navigation, but that is the least of my worries right now. I like that I can display many more articles now per page and that the first lines of every blog post are taken and displayed right away, without me needing to enter an excerpt anymore. COOL!
Now I will just try to create a new header to fit the lighter colors and then I am done. My NaNo is waiting for me.
Oh, and you guys know what? I AM ON VACATION NOW FOR A WEEK! Hurray! Hurray!
Update: Put in the new version of the logo … had to create it anew since I couldn’t find the file I did the first time. Keeping track of things … not my strength. But – and here comes another childish joy attack – I finished my redesign before Jarsto did his on his page *g* He may have written more words than me, but :P (We conveniently ignore the fact that he actually is writing his code himself and does not resort to something as lame as using templates.)
Related Posts
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
What are these “templates” you speak off? ;)
Seriously though congrats on managing the redesign. I’m playing with the idea on going life on my redesign over the weekend. Also thanks for confirming my suspicion that a magazine style layout – while nice – would be more work to maintain than I want to have to put into my blog.
Of course now you’ve got me wondering about building loop variations into a theme to work around some of those problems, but I think I’ll stop doing that and start writing. I spent too much time on my own redesign today already, so I really need to start the word production.
PS The light version is now the main one on http://www.jarsto.nl/testing/ – and I’ve even gone some way towards getting it MSIE6 proof. The one thing I’m not sure on yet is the link colour.
Reply
Starstuff Reply:
November 14th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
‘Templates’ roughly translates to ‘making it really easy for you to give your website an awesome look without having to invest tons and tons of time into writing the code yourself’ :P
Thanks for the compliments, I don’t really deserve them though since I basically just applied the template. Of course, I tweaked it here and there, but for the most, I left it as it was. And re-creating the logo wasn’t that much of a job. I somehow dread the task of creating my photo website though; I want to utilize the full power of flash, xml and all those other abbreviations and I don’t want to use a template there. That will be a larger project for the rest of the year.
And as you rightly read between the lines – if you are not blogging every single day and have tons and tons of content, these magazine styles are really more work than they are worth. They look great, but unless there’s a plugin or a script which will automatically switch categories for a post (for example, the oldest post in FEATURED is taken out of that category when the fourth post is assigned to it), it’s just too much hassle.
What are those loop variations you mentioned?
I like the light version as it is now, especially that the swirls of the background image are visible on the left side as well. As for the link color: have you tried the same color as the background of the left sidebar? Or a deep blue? Those two would match your current color scheme. If you want to stick with red, what about a brighter shade?
Reply
Jarsto Reply:
November 14th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I’ll keep this brief because I should be writing. But basically what I meant by loop variations is running the main wordpress loop (the part that displays posts) with different options for different things.
In the case of you design I wouldn’t have bothered with too many categories. I’d simply have done a category “featured & headlines” and then set the loop to run through the first X posts in that category (X being the number you want linked at the top, plus the one headline post). So you don’t have to move old stuff out of the category because anything older than post X won’t be displayed anyway.
Then the real trick would be to integrate a little counter into loop so you can have it slap different display properties on the newest one (the headline) than on the rest and it should pretty much run itself.
But of course that would take quite a lot of wordpress/php tweaking to setup properly to begin with, so in a sense it’s just moving the time and effort into one single block.
Reply
Starstuff Reply:
November 14th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I am a little intimidated by the fact you could actually do that. For the past two weeks, I have been searching the web for templates which could do that or even better: for these galleries where an image is displayed with a layover layer which hold the name of the corresponding blog post and those images would change. I have had that before, but now I decided against that for the same reason I discarded the magazine layout.
What you wrote about the loop…the theme actually does that. If there are more than X posts to the category, the older ones are not displayed. But I wanted them to be assigned to their ‘real’ category (Headling –> Featured or Featured –> Writing) and that was not possible. They were just supposed to move down from the upper part of the blog to the lower part.
Oh well, I am happy right now with the layout I have, so I already feel the need to implement something moving, something flashy … I am so cheap, I know. But no time to discuss that now, I am just approaching a pivotal scene in my story – finally!
Reply
Leave your response!