Redesign: all around me
Hi everybody! I didn’t really like the previous design, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been designing for wordpress and I still feel very amateur. With this new design I leap into a more professional less amateur way of designing. Improved graphics, functionality and cross-platform, screen, browser support have been the most important features of this last design. I’ll probably keep this design longer than the previous one. I’m so happy! The most difficult task for me is to convince myself indeed… So I hope you like my new design and if not I’m sorry this is my level for now.
I’ll comment a bit this new design as for future references and for those who are interested in the magic behind the scenes.
Well the first thing I’ll tell is that I have a brand new HP screen, beautiful but know what, the resolution was too high, more than normal. That made me run into some problems configuring the layout since it is fixed and most people use the almost standardized screen resolution 1024 x 738. you’ll notice that the width is very tightly adjusted to the margins of the screen because of that.
My other objective was to make it clearer since I will write some slightly academic post which require proof-reading, that means no bright colors, neither too much decoration nor bothering backgrounds. Also I tried to clean out the sidebar using jquery so the user can optionally close it. for the rest I tried to keep only the important information such post update information plus the little message over bended paper on the top.
In order to increase usability and traffic among posts I added the “featured” category posts which shows the best posts I write, therefore providing a higher level of quality in my blog. After every post I added the random or related posts links so the reader can keep navigating through my site. The reason why I chose this method instead of reading older or newer entries method is because it is more customized to the preferences of visitors. this is not a magazine or a newspaper website so it doesn’t make too much sense to keep track of posts through time.
Another challenge I faced was how to put the background which is actually a piece of paper illuminated in the header. Well I split the background into three parts: the header, the footer and the repeating middle background, then distributed them into three different tags or layers depending on the case.
The rest of the functionality is inherited from the previous design. I kept some of the plugins I used maybe there’s a change in styling but it is actually the same.
Well these are basically the features of this new site. Hope you enjoy it and I’ll appreciate any feedback.
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