Beta Testing & Redesign

Published on March 22nd, 2008 in Design, Personal

With the beta release of Wordpress 2.5, I decided to download it and install locally to run through it and see what was new. My first impression of the new improved dashboard was a good one. The team at Happy Cog definitely succeeded in improving the back end. I find the whole process a lot more pleasant now - and not simply because of the aesthetic changes but the functionality on the whole of using the dashboard.

The next step was to download a copy of my own theme and check if everything still looked as it was supposed to. Although it worked perfectly fine, after spending a few minutes testing it out, I had decided I wasn’t quite as pleased with the theme as I was when I first created it. A redesign was the only option I could see coming.

So, I’m now planning a complete overhaul. I am currently thinking about the layout in general and if I want to shift focus more to my portfolio and work or keep the focus on the blog. The option I currently like is a mixture of the two - having a featured post with a few other recent and maybe a list of popular articles. I decided I don’t need to display a list of them on the homepage. After all, isn’t that what our search and archive functions are for??

I am looking into different design styles at the moment and trying to mash up something of my own without sticking to a general style that has been used everywhere else already. It’s hard to think of design elements without it popping into your head that you recognize it from elsewhere - there are so many sites out there and only so many ways to display a page.

It’s likely to be a while away until the launch of the new design, I am not going to rush into something until I am perfectly happy with it. Whilst I still like this design, I feel like it’s just ‘not me’ any more and being unhappy about the design myself, I can’t expect others to like it either. Mockups for a new design are underway now and will continue for the time being. I will post up snippets of what I come with for people to critique and provide feedback.

So what do you think? Do I need a redesign? What would you like to see on the new design?

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