New Site Design
3rd of October, 2009 in the year of our Lord
I just finished putting my new site design up. The motivation to finally finish it came from a much needed break from work and the need to stay up as late as possible so I can work the graveyard shift tomorrow night.
This is much cleaner and hopefully much more appealing to the masses than my old one, while still retaining some of my own interest.
I “wrote my own code” for the contact form. I really just followed a basic tutorial and made some slight modifications… I don’t even remember what the mods were, it was a while back (my convenience store job saps the life out of me). I’m fairly certain I’ll want to redo it in the near future since it doesn’t provide much help to the user who doesn’t fare well with technology.
The random image script used on the portfolio page came from some code by Matt Mullenweg.
I’ll be surprised, albeit pleasantly, if there are no bugs. That being said let me know if you find any, or if you have any other suggestions. What do you think of the forms? Are the inputs too confusing? It’s kind of a pain to get the focus on the inputs in the contact form in IE… I almost want to not do anything about it to punish anyone using IE, but I need some work and you just never know from whom it may come.
Also, what do you think of the presentation of my work? The web design page could use some mods, but I need to get some stuff up and running before I can do much with it. Some of the sites are no longer available so I need to make some WordPress themes out of ‘em and put ‘em on here for download.
In short, this is the new look of the site, I’d love to hear what you think, and I hope you’ll check back for the new stuff I’m planning on doing in the (hopefully) near future.
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I just found a bug! Be on the lookout.
3rd of October, 2009
This is sooooooo not plain english…please revise.
3rd of October, 2009
ha… i don’t think i will. at least not now. thanks for checking it out and leaving a comment!
3rd of October, 2009
It all looks nice. My general impression is that there’s a lot of whitespace (or fleur-de-lis’d space… whatever you want to call it), which results in the design being pretty spread out. If someone is using 1024×768 or lower, I think everything but the header and about the top half of your post title is below the fold.
The comment and contact forms are a little strange to me. The fact that the text boxes aren’t distinguished from the background makes the functionality less than obvious. (They show up in Safari when selected (because of the blue glow), but remain non-visible in Firefox except for the cursor.)
It actually seems to translate fairly well to mobile Safari (except for its inability to display English Towne).
3rd of October, 2009
thanks for the feedback. i’ll look more into it later.
i can say i was worried about the forms. and fear i may have to change them.
7th of October, 2009
i usually don’t care about below the fold stuff on web, which i thought may have been kind of a bad thing, but this article says otherwise.
3rd of October, 2009
One thing that I think would spruce the design up a little is some animation on hovers (The submit buttons, rss, and your link icons up at the top).
How would the navigation bar look with a little bit of texture?
Also, the forms are a bit confusing (I can’t see the text areas in chrome), but it sounds like you already have that on your agenda.
Also, I like the bread crumb bar, the little rook is a nice touch.
6th of October, 2009
i think i’ll be adding some animation on hovers, i like that idea. and some subtle texture on the navbar would probably be good.
thanks for the suggestions.
11th of October, 2009
Yeah below the fold doesn’t matter unless your a newspaper. I like the updated nav. Looks better. And white space is GOOD. I like it.
11th of October, 2009
thanks dude.