I have been thinking for months on a new design for this site. I had the “book marker” design for two years in two different forms, 3 column fluid and two column fixed. Countless of times I opened Photoshop, started with some idea just to sent them to the trash.

Friday I was browsing flickr on the search term “beach” and I came across two photos, endless summer and California Surf Wagons that inspired this new design. I used to have a beach/surf design and always wanted to use that theme again.

Friday night I started in photoshop and it was all coming without effort. I was surprised with myself as I always struggle to create a complete design I actually like. And this time I really kept doing things over until they where perfect in my eyes. I did these navigation tabs like 5 times before I was satisfied.

The coding part went easy as I didn’t do any Windows/Firefox and Windows/IE testing yet. Also I used PNG for the transparent images so that is guaranteed to suck on IE6 or less. But according to my Mint stats the only IE6 or less users I get are people looking for images through Google, so no loss there. But when I get time I will fix support for IE.

I hardcoded the flickr like badge instead of using the javascript because I wanted rounded corners on my images and not only on the border. So it was like they say a “creative decision”.

And yes this site is loading awfully slow. Because I’m forced by my host to run on CGI instead of FastCGI. The old design wasn’t heavy on images so it wasn’t such a huge issue. But now it’s like back to the 90’s @ 24kbps. But as soon as I get a few hours to monitor my site I’ll switch to FastCGI and hope it goes well so I can leave it there.

Well I hope you like this design as I do and if you are reading this from a RSS reading open up that web browser and take a look!

Update: as of Monday running much faster on FastCGI, hopefully I can leave it on it.