tonyballinger.com

In actually, I redesigned my site about a year ago. I comped it out in Fireworks (as I always do), I went through a few versions (I went back and forth on the green color) and even cut it up into HTML and CSS. And then we had a baby, and implementing the redesign into WordPress was put on the back burner. But we’re pretty much on top of this parenting business now (knock on wood) and this weekend I actually found myself with a bit of free time. I had pretty much forgotten what free time was or what it was for, but I found a few spare hours to get the forgotten design into WordPress.

A Few Words About the New Design

Faith already doesn’t like it – she liked seeing the three large photos of Cooper at the top of the page instead of ten thumbnail photos in the sidebar. And, now that I’m looking at it in my PC environment at 1024×768, I can see I didn’t leave much breathing room in the left and right margins for folks on smaller monitors. Lastly, I totally didn’t test the new design on IE6. I’m sure I’ll get to that during my next batch of free time, but as this is a personal site and not a business site – I’m going to cut myself a little slack on IE6. I troubleshoot CSS in IE6 enough during the day and I’m not looking to spend a lot of free time doing it on the evenings and weekends too.

That said, I did put “display:inline” in all my CSS floats tonight, as well as SuperSleight to get PNG transparency in for the IE6 folks.

Other Nerdery

It’s been a bit since I tinkered with my WordPress theme and I had forgotten how generally lousy the search results were and how awkward my archive landing pages were. A few Google searches later and I found the Search Except WordPress Plugin for highlighting searched terms and edited a few lines of PHP to put abstracts in my archive pages instead of full posts.

How About a Footer?

One thing I didn’t redesign was my footer – I’m still trying to figure out what to do about that. For the moment, I’m going to concentrate on fixing the couple of validation errors I have and clean up my CSS. At this point I’m just really excited to get the redesign live after a long time of looking at the old site design and wishing it were a bit more contemporary looking.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.