And here we go, folks — step one of the new design. It’s not completely finished yet, as all I’ve got active at the moment is the primary content, but the rest will follow soon enough.
Update: Okay, I should have thought to check this first, but this redesign has just proven — again — that Internet Explorer sucks. This may or may not get fixed in the future — I’m tempted to just leave it as-is. I’m doing things correctly, dammit, and it’s not my fault that that program doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Grrr.
Update: That’s it — we’re live. The only page I have yet to dink with is the ‘About’ page, but considering it’s 4:22am, I need to get to bed. All pages linked in the navbar now work, and there are even more choices for RSS feeds available (Full posts with comments, full posts without comments, and excerpts only). I still haven’t looked into the IE wierdnesses, but that will come. Maybe.
I’ve gotta get used to the placement of things above or below posts and the banner up top isn’t centered but it looks really good!
Gak. Okay, I hate IE. A lot.
Everything looks fine in Safari and Camino, but it’s all sorts of wonky on IE/Mac. And, since IE/Mac generally renders things better than IE/PC, it’s probably a safe assumption that things are broken there, too.
(sigh)
I don’t suppose I could convince all of you to upgrade to a browser that actually works like it’s supposed to?
Oh, well. I’ll see what I can do about it — later. For now, I’m off to see about kicking Bill Gates and the IE programming team about, oh, 20 or 30 times each.
Looks fine in Mozilla. Since your code validates, IE’s failings are not your concern, are they? So you put up a disclaimer. “Not reponsible for IE bugs”!
I wouldn’t assume that IE Mac is better than IE PC. Some things are worse, or missing.
Wooohoo….I like it and I’m running IE-6 on a PC… Bugs? what bugs? Everything looks and works great. Ok the skyline shot isn’t centered Who cares? Your doing great. It almost reminds me of when I redid my house the best thing I did was to get rid of half my furniture. The openess was shocking as it is on this site. Feel free to play around and get to a place where your’re comfortable and if that means someone somewhere has a bug or two that’s their problem. I’m willing to please the world right after I pleased myself and I haven’t finished that yet. To thine own self be true…
Ok I’ve just spent 15 min roaming around looking at things and checking links and other than the already mentioned header photo. The only thing I see is the fact I can’t spell you’re properly. Good work Wudi.
looks very good. nice clean design. i was having trouble with it in Safari earlier this morning, but it looks much better now.
nice work. now i really have to redesign my blog.
quick critique – and there isn’t much to say on this end, things look great:
1) if you’re going to center your layout, you should center the skyline image at the top. i run at a pretty high res, and the image runs out just after the halfway point. Centering should solve this.
2) a little more room above title boxes will increase useful white space and make it even easier to see what’s what. don’t fear the white space – you’re getting better at this one already. :)
3) on the user end – making a link back to your main page from second-level pages would be nice for us lazy readers who click links rather than ‘back’ sometimes. there are a few ways you could do this (adding another link to horizontal selections – making ‘title’ of any page return to home (eh) – adding small set of text links at bottom of page (may be good anyway) – etc).
that’s it from me. i might do a couple more things myself, but this is your page, and the things i would do are personal preference, not something that would definitely increase your style or usability. i think you’ve got a good thing going!
regarding the skyline image, what you can do is to try to tile the image using photoshop first then on your style sheet, set the background to repeat…so that it will span across the whole screen seemlessly…as to how u can tile the image…its heheh u have to do some trial an error.
a couple of usability issues now that i have had a day or teo to look around:
As posted above, a link back to the blog from the second level pages would be good. i know you have “eclecticism” linked in the header on those pages, but it’s not intuative, especially since you spend most fo your time on the blog and use the navigation there. i’d suggest an additional button along with the about…feeds buttons.
the location of the author and comments links for posts keeps confusing me. i’m sure i’ll get used to it, but i keep clicking on the info at the bottom of a post which is really in the header for the next post. might just be me, but that was the line i would always use when giving usability reports to clients.
Maybe it’s just me, but i don’t like the blogroll being on a different page. the blogroll is one of the great things about blogs and greatly contributes to the sense of community. having it on a different page from the main blog lessens the sense of community. it improves the design (!) but takes away from th blog as a whole.
urgh! i just did item 2 again when re-reading the comments on this post!
don’t let any of this take away from the fact that i really like the new look. it’s just my desire to everything working properly. a desire i tend not to apply to my own blog.