2004 Redesign Update

January 27, 2004 | 6 Comments

Pardon my dust, I’m in the midst of a total redesign and reorganization of the site. Most of you won’t notice a thing until the new (and hopefully improved) version is up and live, but I wanted to give a little update as to how it’s coming along.

The new layout is fairly complicated, more so than much of the work I’ve done. I did have some layout issues with the initial templates mostly due to IE but to be honest even with it’s problems IE had it almost right. I removed some widths and tweaked the margins and got it 99% of the way there.

There are still a few display issues that I’ve not been able to resolve all the way, but I’ve got it working nicely in just about everything. For the most part I think I’m where I can live with it. It looks really great on Safari and Mozilla Mac. It’s hosed in Opera, a tinsy bit strange in Mozilla Windows and slightly off in IE 6.0.

My biggest problem now is that, in Mozilla Firebird Windows the main navigation is a bit off, for some reason it sets the line height differently than any of the other browsers. You can see how it should look in the little sneak peak shot. In Mozilla the text isn’t aligned to the middle. I’ve tried several ways of doing this and they don’t seem to work. If anyone has an idea as to why this would happen I’d welcome any solutions.

Now that I’ve got the site’s template nailed most the way down I’m working on building out the site and reorganizing parts of it. If you’ve notice some phantom entries in your RSS feed or things of that nature, this is the reason. I’m going to try and keep those to a minimum but a few are unavoidable.

I’m reworking the categories a bit and moving things, like my photos and external links into the blog as entries. I hope to consolidate things a bit and make them easier for me to manage as well as make it a bit more fun and easy for the users as well.

I’ve put a lot of thought into my new design and I really hope you’re going to like it and it’ll last for a long, long time. I’ve even gone so far as to do some user testing and it’s gone over very, very well. It should really be a step up from what you are looking at now.

I’m not doing it in public, as I’d rather have a good old fashioned “launch” but if you real want to have a butchers, and can keep it on the down-low, drop me a line and I’ll share.

I’m also taking notes and documenting my goals and the reasons for my redesign, my process, the problems, the solutions and my thinking on things and the whys and hows of my decisions. I hope to publish that in some way when I’m done. I know I really benefit from other folks sharing their lessons learned and I hope you’ll all benefit from mine.

Filed under: My Sites