Finally the new design is here and even though I haven’t implemented all the things I wanted to implement I’ve made good headway. Mostly the design is based on my mentor, guru and love all his work Douglas Bowman (even the old site was based on one of his blogger templates). I wanted to implement a three column aproach to give me room to show more stuff on the front page. Obviously the latest post gets the biggest screen real estate, with comments down to your left and older archives in the middle. The all important music gets the right column. This layout was chosen because I’d seen some info Michael had sent me about what a person looks at when they first view a website and thought that this would follow that idea the closest.


The layout is set down using stylesheets so of course there is some browser quirkiness. The most noticeable is the in your face way that Internet Explorer underlines the links. It’s so much prettier in firefox and because I’m biased towards that browser I decided I didn’t want to fiddle to make the underlines better in that oh so insecure microsoft web browser.

I wanted to separate my travel journeys into a section of their own to give me more flexibility in their layouts and to make it a bit easier to navigate. The benefit is also that I can grab some of my delicious links that relate specifically to the destination I’m talking about. The only exception to that is the travel index page – for that I just grab anyones link who bookmarked it with the word travel.

For the banner I used the logo I purchased from gotlogos.com for $25 US and combined it with some of my favourite things and a vector graphic of me in my atari shirt without a face. I did start to draw a face but Pauline reckoned I looked better without one. Thanks Pauline. 😉

This is all now running on the 3.2 version of movable type which is a real advance in the application. It now uses ajax for some of it’s user interface and handles plugins much better.

My next project will be to integrate the photo gallery in to the same look and feel as this site, and I’m debating whether to stick with gallery or start using movable type as the photo gallery app like my lord Douglas Bowman. I’ve also got some cool little javascript image things planned for you to look forward to.

For now I’m glad that my posting freeze is over and I can get back to writing blog entries again. Over the next few days I’ll upload some of my discarded designs so you can see why it took me over 4 months to get it to this point. You’ll see a lot of crap – I promise.

I hope you all like it and that all this hard work was for something other than a learning experience for me. I’m so glad to be back!

Comments

comments

5 thoughts on “What a mission

  1. xeno says:

    Not upset that there isn’t a Kelly tab? Can you tell its Amy even without a face?

    Reply
  2. amyo says:

    I’m going to add a section that links to for other peoples blogs. I didn’t add a Kelly link up the top because I think she is a blogger in her own right and has her own legion of fans. She doesn’t need any help from me anymore.

    Reply
  3. Kel says:

    Woot! Can I buy a shirt that says “I’m a blogger?”

    Nah, I’m not upset – this site is for Amy, and not to support her ever-changing-template blogging sister 🙂

    Reply

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