A sneak preview on my new design
Filed under: design
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Tagged with: It's not a common thing to do for me to show new designs in advance. However this time I'm going to make an exception. As some of you may know I am hoping to get nominated for a Dutch Bloggie for Best Design. You may like the current design but it has it's problems and limitations which is why I'm working on a new one. It's almost done in fact. I'm ironing out the last issues and I expect to throw it online within a week. Since there's only one week to go when it comes to getting nominated and because I feel it would be fair to show in advance what you'd actually be voting for I'm throwing in a sneak preview.
You can click the images to get a full size impression!
Frontpage
A whole new look as you can see. Yet I preserved the main 'theme' of the site: the road to nowhere. Other than that, most things have changed dramatically. This new design was made to put more focus on the content. Therefore a lot of sidebar stuff has been 'hidden' behind a tabbed interface in order to make it less prominent. The tabs feature nice script.aculo.us effects. Among them you'll find an AJAX livesearch and an AJAX comment form, all powered by prototype.js and scrip.aculo.us for effects. The linkdump has been 'demoted' to the bottom of the screen, next to the older entries you're already used to in the current design.
Commenting and Trackbacking
Commenting and trackbacks have been placed at the bottom of all full entry pages. The comment form will feature AJAX feedback and possibly AJAX commenting (if I can get it to work with Pivot). The hardened trackbacks you're already used to will be integrated in this new bottom structure as well.
The sidebar tabs
As I mentioned before, the sidebar has been compacted in order to provide more attention to the content and less 'fuss' in view. Since this 'fuss' can be interesting and useful nevertheless I did want to keep it in a more compact form. In the above screenshot you can see the new contact form. Again: AJAX with prototype.js and script.aculo.us. No more assholes spamming my contact form hopefully.
Finishing up
I'm quite happy with the way this new design is coming along. The XHTML is much cleaner and I've managed to create a behavioral javascript layer which is fully separated from the presentation. The only javascript call you'll find in the code is a body onload one, like it should be. While there's still quite some work to do I hope to be able to go online with this new look in a week or so. Therefore, if you were considering nominating me for a Dutch Bloggie for best design*, now you know what the site will look like once the jury starts reviewing. If you are a 9ruler, now you know what I changed since I last showed my progress on the forum. If you're neither Dutch nor a 9ruler, at least you know what this site will look like in the future now!
Stay tuned!
*So if you're Dutch, now go nominate me :P
At 15 January '06 - 13:32 Saskia wrote:
At 15 January '06 - 13:46 Bram wrote:
Grrrrr, just now when I was almost happy with my own redesign, I feel the urge coming up again to start over and try to come up with something equal in quality.
At 15 January '06 - 15:25 bosmeneer wrote:
Just some good points; the ‘tabbed’ menu, good font (Century Gothic I guess?), nice picture (shoot it yourself?), real neat design for the archive and linkdumps, good combination of the colors.
But… please drop the ad! The hosting isn’t expensive at all I thought?
At 15 January '06 - 21:51 Tibor wrote:
It won’t keep me from nominating you though; a truely State Of The Art design dude!
At 16 January '06 - 00:45 Rogier wrote:
The look scrambled.
At 16 January '06 - 01:22 Marco wrote:
I noticed it too. I’ll probably add the header text in photoshop.
At 16 January '06 - 01:24 Nandini wrote:
Well executed.
At 16 January '06 - 01:32 Ozh wrote:
Another note : I see your design will have chitika implemented. I’ve always thought of ads as part of design, so you’re right working with ads in mind rather than trying to incorporate them later on a layout that was not designed with ads in mind. However… I see no adsense ? Chitika is almost dead, you know ;)
At 16 January '06 - 01:36 Marco wrote:
But to be honest I’m wondering whether I should have ads at all. The revenues are totally pathetic and it does kinda hurt the look of the site even though they can be themed quite well.
I’m still thinking about it.
At 16 January '06 - 10:29 Marco wrote:
All I need to do still is take care of the archive pages and I guess I’ll be good to go!
At 22 January '06 - 07:34 Hong Hui wrote: