Finally I’ve come up with a new design. The previous one lasted for a year with is pretty good but it was time for something new. This new design is inspired by books, I chose a page holder as it is more practical for the design and my photoshop skill level. When I think about books I think: brown, serif fonts, page holder and content.
The biggest change is the shift from 2 to 3 columns and the width of the design. I chose for 3 columns because I was getting tired of the extra long sidebar which didn’t present the content on a practical way. Now there is a better overview of the content. And it’s more easy to shift between the columns content on different levels of the site.
The big discussion, design for 800×600 or 1024×768? Well thanks to Mint I can say for my own website that 800×600 is the past, 1024×768 is the new black.
- 1024 × 768 — 34%
- 1280 × 1024 — 24%
- 1152 × 864 — 7%
- 1280 × 854 — 6%
- 1680 × 1050 — 6%
- 1440 × 900 — 4%
- 1280 × 800 — 4%
- 1600 × 1200 — 4%
- 1400 × 1050 — 3%
- 800 × 600 — 3%
- 1920 × 1200 — 2%
- 1280 × 960 — 1%
Validation and Compatibility
For the first time I didn’t bother to validate the website, mainly because there are a lots of errors in the content itself. If some pages validate, great, otherwise they’ll have to wait till I get time to go through the code. And for the browsers, considering that this was designed on OS X it’s displayed best on it in Firefox and Safari. On Windows Firefox it displays good also but IE has some ugly mishaps. But to say truthfully, this being my personal website I couldn’t care less if IE is not supported.
For the contact page I tried some AJAX from JeffPipas.com. While the form does work more or less I still have to really dig in AJAX to understand it better. If there is on thing I always struggled with it is Javascript. A good book on AJAX will be my best bet to learn it. And hopefully this new form will stop the spams I’ve been getting once a while.
I have been really out of practice with CSS/XHTML, luckily I had the fellow members of 9rules to help me out. I must do my best to keep coding regularly to raise my skill and keep it on level. And while I’m no core designer this is the design I most like up until now. It’s simple, nice colors, and holds the content well. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this design…
