Notes on the Redesign

If any of you reading Bokardo tend to stay in your RSS reader, you wouldn’t have noticed my latest redesign of Bokardo.com. Not given to wholesale redesign much, I actually did the redesign over several weeks after finally getting a local copy of my blog running on my Powerbook (it wasn’t that hard, but I tend to procrastinate on things that take longer than 15 minutes to do).

A few notes:

• New Color Scheme
  A new blue/green/orange color scheme that stands outs starkly against my old grey and brown one. Lots of folks thought the old one was too subdued, and I think they’re right if I’m going to be talking about new ideas.
• Liquid Design
  I’ve long had a fixed-width design here at Bokardo, and I finally accepted something about it. Fixed-width designs are simply not as efficient as liquid designs. You can fit more information on a page when it is liquid. When I thought of it from that standpoint, and not from a developer’s control standpoint, it became obvious that I had to go liquid. The problem with liquid, however, is that it can really make columns of text awkward to read, and on the widest screens it gets rediculous. Anybody on a really big screen? Let me know how it goes…
• 3 Column Layout
  Partially in response to the liquid layout, I’m using three columns on all pages now, not just the home page as before. This allows me to provide more meta-information about each post. To create these three columns and not have them break in IE, I had to add some additional <div>s to the markup. I hope I don’t burn in semantic markup hell.
• More Linkage
  The theme of my new redesign was links, links, links. The more links to content I can show, the more likely it is that people will find something that interests them. I’ve got links from Del.icio.us, links to Web 2.0 mavens, links to more achive pages, and I’ll be adding more soon. Each of my link sections is a simple library file in wordpress, so changing one takes about 3 minutes.
• My Bottom
  Taking a cue from Derek Powazek, I’ve embraced my bottom. Jeff over at Newburyportion pointed me to this, and I recognized it as the blogging equivalent of what Amazon has been doing for a while now. It feels good to embrace my bottom.

By the way, if you’ve got feedback on the redesign (good, bad, or indifferent), send it along. The comments are still there, and I have a contact page now!