Yet Another Design Evolution…
Welcome to the newly re-re-re-designed Richard’s Ramblings! The blog has seen quite a bit of upheaval in 2007 with three different designs, perhaps mirroring the unsettled psyche of its creator (me!). The year isn’t even over, so perhaps even more surprises are yet to come!
It didn’t start out so schizoid, though!
With the first pages of ramblings published in March 2002, the fledgling blog began Internet life with a basic near-white type on a dark-blue background with gold and light blue accents. It was based on Movable Type. A stable four years later, the blog still had the same basic color scheme (although with white text) on the same CMS platform, with only minor style and usability changes.
It was 2006, though, that brought a flood of change. With the not-so-great changes in the direction Movable Type was taking, it was time to jump ship to the latest and greatest thing to come along: WordPress. Complete incompatibility between the two systems (Perl vs PHP) meant a complete redesign. A theme representing Burnt Orange invaded my head during that transition, so a Halloween-reminiscent design was created — white and near-white text (although larger than before!) on a black background, bright orange hyperlinks, and a dark-green accent. A dark and harsh mood, again, most likely a result of my mindset. This was the first design to receive a fixed width to allow more design options that were unfortunately never utilized.
Not surprisingly not terribly well received, the spooky look next evolved about nine months later 180 degrees into a brand-new, large, bright, three-column design, originally created to improve usability and the look and feel on larger monitors. Mostly black text on a white background with a large gray header, the remaining accents and color schemes were changed after each page refresh by matching colors taken from a randomly rotating image in the header (for example, Angelina Jolie’s lipstick color was used for the color of links and accents when her photo was shown). A pithy byline related to the image also appeared underneath the blog title to tie the theme together. Cool, fun, and trend-setting, it was a waste of space, plus the three-column layout never felt right in a maximized browser. To counteract the somewhat boring theme (apart from the way-cool dynamic changes!), a lot more nudity was introduced into old and new blog entries. Needed just that little extra bit o’ spice to offset the blandness.
Desirous of fixing the space and feel issues, I created a new theme in July of 2007 from scratch. So what happened during that redesign? Even more space was wasted! I had envisioned several more than the existing three tabs to be used, but the idea never came to fruition, leaving gobs of unused space and 100 pixels of header room to be reclaimed. Like the last design, this one sported black text on a white background with changeable accents. However, unlike the previous design, the entire header had been programmed to change dynamically! The theme had the potential to be really amazing, but I only created the one Doctor-Who-themed header, which I was never fully pleased with. Thus Harry Potter, James Bond, Torchwood, and a few dozen others never had their days on stage. The family-oriented look didn’t fit with the often R-rated content. And why I chose the Georgia font for this theme, I have absolutely no idea.
This month brings yet another look to the blog. Cleaner, leaner, sans serif, and a nod to the blog’s beginnings, this design brings back the fonts and blue-and-gold colors of five and a half years ago, mixed with the white background and someday-to-be-better-utilized tabs of the recent looks. No randomly dynamic scheme changes this round, however. The goals of the new changes are to increase revenue generation, showcase designs and added functionality, and to keep simplicity and ease-of-use as top priorities.
A list of a few of the most important plug-ins installed and activated in the current design:
- AJAX Comment Preview — gives instant previews of comments before submitting them.
- Akismet — the greatest anti-comment-spam tool.
- Devowelizer — allows you (or visitors) to type “fûçk” without tripping censors.
- Flickr Images — one of mine, unpublished; obviously, it shows images from Flickr.
- JASON Monthly Archive — one of mine, unpublished; does the nice archive formatting.
- Link Indication — puts nifty icons next to external links.
- Paged Comments — splits many comments into manageable pages (example).
- Plugin Output Cache — caches expensive database query results from plug-ins.
- Post Teaser — a bit smarter than WordPress’ standard excerpts.
- Recent Love — displays the most recent comments.
- Similar Posts — instant classification of posts to help find similar posts.
- Slimbox Plugin — creates a sexy display of images (example).
- Text Replace — another of mine, unpublished; used for quick macros.
- UniqueVisitors — used to more easily identify repeat anonymous visitors.
- wp-Table — allows easy, external maintenance of tabled data (example).
Will the latest look survive the month? Who knows! Welcome to the evolution!
Much better without the medium-blue-text-on-dark-blue-background header. You know what kinds of problems THAT can lead to!
Three minor comments:
Overall, tho, I like the clean look of the site.
(I’d never noticed that colors in the three-column design came from an element of the header. Tres cool!)
Pretty sure each of those glitches are addressed now. Thanks for the feedback!
Thank ‘ee, sir!
(Now if you could just bring back the “lot more nudity being introduced”…)
Oh, that’ll happen with time (and boredom)!
Hmmm. Not caring so much for the parade of Flikr Photos.
For me, it depends on the how well the Flickr posters properly tag their images. The control I have is quite limited. While I have endeavored to limit the scope of Flickr images to portraits of female models, sometimes the owners spam their images with irrelevant tags, causing me somewhat legitimately to fear that someday I’ll be surprised by nightmarish closeup images of a naked, hairy, fat guy on my blog.
Other images, however, when properly tagged, can be inspirational to me — I am fascinated by the artistry and design, the rim and fill lighting, the gels, the color balances. Photography is the most important artistic medium to me; while I will never have the opportunity to produce my own equivalent of what is often quite incredible, high-quality, professional studio photography of female models, I can at least learn from and study the work of others who have the means and opportunity.
I’ve designed the WordPress plugin so that traffic remains on my website, even while viewing the images, which can hopefully result in visitor retention and ultimately monetization. Unfortunately the Flickr API does not allow me to sort or otherwise filter out images, and presents them only in the order most recently added, so I will sometimes be burdened with a series of images that I dislike or are simply uninteresting. The good news is that the proliferation of Flickr images means that replacement is always imminent, giving me fresh new content every few hours.