My website has been getting old and crusty. After several months of false starts and half-developed ideas, I finally hit upon a new layout I can be comfortable with.
Friends and family (and any other improbable return visitors) will notice that the new layout is very similar stylistically to the old. Same colors (black, blue, green, white), same major sections (header, navigation, intro, content, sub content, footers), same basic positioning of each section. There are quite a few subtle changes, however.
First of all, the content title (second-level heading) now takes precedence over the site title. I’ve been convinced that traffic to a site (particularly a blog) is there for the article content, not to read the name of the person who wrote it in giant letters. Secondly, the content area is wider—I felt very constrained by the narrow column width I’d given myself before.
Finally, there is a much more consistent font styling and spacing treatment. This, and the new width, are due to my deciding to use the 960 Grid System via the Grid System Generator. I have been very hesitant to adopt a CSS layout system until now because most require either additional (non-relevant) markup be added to content, or adopting an ID and CLASS naming convention for elements that is not semantically meaningful.
Therefore this is somewhat of an experiment… although I must say that after about six previous attempts to update my site for 2009, editing the stylesheets and designing the markup for this system is much much simpler than attempting to write it myself. On several past (un-launched) implementations I would struggle for days to discover the correct combination of HTML elements, CSS selectors and rules, IDs, classes… and every new discovery always meant going back to the beginning. On the other hand, I was able to get this new layout up and running in probably less than eight hours.
It’s so much simpler, in fact, that I am considering how to use the 960 System (or something similar) for my current “non-professional” project, Yehoodi 3.0.
Let me know what you think! Also, the snips portion of my site (which will most likely be replaced by Twitter) is down until I rewrite my database queries.
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