davemcnally.net

Yeah, the title is true and yeah, the above image is what it looks like - I stopped my site from working properly in IE6 & earlier. Want to know why? Read on…

So, it’s not quite finished and no doubt things will keep cropping up throughout the week which need fixing, there’s a lot of little things left to do. But I’m tired now and thought I would tidy up as I go. I’ll talk a bit about the redesign here but will go into more detail once I’ve had some sleep! Lets start shall we?

Firstly, my apologies for the lack of any entries lately. I hope it will be worth it though, the reason being - I’m currently coding up my redesign to get it done asap, tested and launched.

I will also be updating to 2.5 with the updated theme rather than doing it right away. I have a couple of added plugins I am working into the new design as well which should add a couple of things that I feel are currently missing. So, if things suddenly start looking quite odd or something breaks, I am probably in the process of upgrading and tweaking the theme!

The new design should be done within a week or so, after which, I will be spending some more time here, I have a load of plans for articles and a couple of new features coming too

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?

I have recently been thinking about creating a couple of free wordpress themes. So I started looking for some inspiration online and to see what others were doing currently.

I started noticing a slight pattern among some of the more higher quality, recently launched designs. A lot of new sites are cropping up all over the place with Vectors/Illustrations as the focal point in the design. I really like this kind of design and remembered seeing an example first at The Rissington Podcast. I then came across StrawPoll which is done in a similar way.

Shortly after, I read about the upcoming Silverback from Clearleft. This design not only reminded me about the others I had previously seen but made me notice another common trait between these sites. They are all fairly flexible with browser sizes and resizing the window whilst looking at any of them will show you some pretty nice effects.

So, are we finally moving away from default drop shadows, gradients and bevels? I hope so. I certainly prefer these new designs over the Web 2.0 looking ones. It will be interesting to see what other people come out with shortly and if this pattern is continued. We may be witnessing the start of Web 3.0…