And then it was redesigned

Surely I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, I can’t sit on one design for too long, personally I think I’ve done well to hold out for nearly 7 months this time. If you’re reading this in your favourite feedreader, then you’re missing out on the interesting bit, you can’t see my *awesome* redesign unless you’re reading this in a browser, so, hop to it.

Wait

Isn’t it only like 6 weeks since you last redesigned? No, the last redesign went live the week after Christmas last year, which means its over 6 months since I’ve redesigned. So there :P

Why

I’ve gotten into a habit of redesigning (or at least refreshing) around the time that I upgrade to the latest and great version of WordPress. This time around I knew 2.8 was just around the corner and planned to go live with redesign while I was upgrading. That didn’t happen.

I also needed to do something to escape/take my mind off/avoid certain other things, and a redesign is great for that. Only problem that brought was that I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to the redesign as I normally would.

When

I started on this in mid May (I think), the layout changed numerous times in the first couple of weeks before I (mostly) settled on what you see now. Since then though I’ve rewritten the ‘theme’ behind this half a dozen times, still not sure I’m entirely happy with it, but its better than before.

Woot

I finally got this to a point where I’m happy for to to go live. I’ve been living with it for a few weeks fixing broken things as I found them. I was tempted several time to just put it live and deal with broken crap at a later date (its what I’ve done every other time) but vowed that I would only go live once I was happy.

There are still couple of plugins that I need to update, and a couple I want to partially rewrite (they appear to be using a huge numbers of queries without great reason).

Wow

Well, I think its a wow, you can let me know what you think in the comments. More than ever this design is almost entirely CSS, there is a background image (for the sideways text) and a couple of small logos, but everything else is CSS. As a result this site quite possible looks like arse in Internet Explorer. I don’t care.

The redesign has sticky posts, sprinkles of big text, fancy dropcaps (ok, I had those before) and other shiny things. I’ve tried to simplify some areas (probably unsuccessfully), and add ‘value’ to others, even if its just value for myself. For example, on the downloads page I’ve added calculations for ‘total downloads’ and ‘downloads per day’.

Werd

Or more accurately type. I may have gone a little overboard, but it was fun styling things I know almost certainly won’t work in IE. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. A couple of highlights, for me, are the new download links you’ll find on the project pages, and the big month/year being displayed on the archive pages. Helvetica/Helvetica Neue (and variants) FTW.

Well then

Thats not all. I’m planning on adding a portfolio section (different to the projects section I’ve already got), but its not nearly ready to be added just yet, its something I will work on later in the year.

Whoa

Before you ask, and there those of you who will, you always do. No, you can’t have this ‘theme’. Would you ask Gizmodo for their theme? No, ok some of you might. I’m not being nasty, even if I gave you this ‘theme’, its unlikely that you’d be able to do much with it anyway, its coded to work with the posts, structure, categories, content etc for this site, so unless your site is a clone…

Ok, now before you abuse me for not giving YOU the design of MY site, listen to this. I haven’t released anything to the WordPress community for 7 (long) months, I’ve got numerous things in progress though, including: updates to Fluency2, an ‘Archives’ plugin (to replicate the archive layout I use here), Captain Planet (I’ll release it one day I promise), and a few other that you know nothing about ;)

On top of that I’m planning on going back to working on themes that you can all use, perhaps even a framework of sorts. I make no promises about when, what or how much I’ll release, but I’ll try and get some of them out into the WP world before the end of the year.

Whee

I’ve run out ‘W’ words. Keep an eye out for my continued blogging, and watch out for plugin and theme releases in the coming months. Enjoy the redesign, let me know if/when you find things that are broken, be warned though, if you tell me it doesn’t work in IE6 (or even 7 for that matter) I’m going to ignore you.