About a month ago, I have become obsessed with changing the design and the technology on this blog.
I’ve been reading a great blog on web design, Vandelay Design and somehow, seeing all those superb websites featured there, got me into thinking that I might be able to create an equally great design for my own blog.
I may have succeeded. I may have even invented a couple of things that were not done on a blog before. Not sure about that though 
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For example, I have thrown away the old articles navigator, with the “read more” link replacing the articles page with a visual navigator.
Before, I had to choose the first couple of sentences in such a way as to entice the visitor to click on read more.
But this website is visually rich, thanks to the wonderful works of art I’m presenting so a visual representation of the article may be even more attractive than a few well chosen words.
Then, I am hoping the design is a bit more modern, with all those transparency effects and reflections. I also tried to be much more verbose wit hall the elements the user will need to walk around the website. Like the Read More! section at the bottom of the article. I figured there’s no need to be skimpy with the categories / next articles / previous articles links. On the contrary, users might appreciate having rich navigation controls on every page, provided they are easy to use and they don’t get in the way.
I am hoping that the simplicity and unusual position for the logo will create a nice effect as well.
And I tried to make it all about the content of the articles, an not about the structural elements of the website, leaving as much space as possible for the article content. This is why I moved the fixed header I had before to the right, there’s more space horizontally than vertically with these 16:9 monitors.
I have designed and redesigned every aspect of this blog, even the most simple thing like the position of “the about me” link.
All in all, it took me 3 weeks of design, using only Paint.NET by the way; I didn’t write a sing line of code in the first 3 weeks.
Later on, it took me 2 weeks to implement it using WordPress 2.9 (PHP based technology, not my strongest point). I wrote a theme from scratch and the result is really not the average blog or so I’m hoping. I was very pleased to learn about the Image Flow component written by Finn Rudolph, a javascript library, very small, very neat, that works amazingly on every browser. I have modified it slightly and I used it for the visual navigator on the landing page and the text only navigation control in the footer of every article.
I am of course still using the great Slimbox library for browsing article images and the jQuery library which makes Slimbox possible.
No content was lost wit the migration thanks to the great import/export features in WordPress but some of the existing external links may not work anymore.
I am hoping that most of them will work just fine.
This is the end result. I hope you like it. Come back now and again, I will return to writing as soon as I catch a breath of air, the past 5 weeks were difficult. I am tired but excited.
Happy holidays everybody.
