I did a quick write-up on the changes at BrowserMetrics early this morning, but I don’t think it does justice to, if at all mentions, the design process I went through. After most design/development, I feel it productive to have a postmortem where the process and the product are evaluated for the good and bad of it.
Layout and CSS
In the late 90s, I worked in a web design company helping to churn out pages for lame ass businesses. We did everything with tables. This layout doesn’t use any of that. It is purely CSS driven. I am proud of that. I took me some time to find out how it works. Now that I do know how it does, I want to tweak this layout some more.
My last template centered everything in two small tidy columns that didn’t fill all the entire screen. I wanted to try to use the screen to its fullmost. First, the content area of the posts needed to be larger. It now sits fixed to the left size with a generous width. Notice, that when you enlarge the browser window that the posts don’t change size. That’s what I was going for.
The sidebar I wanted to consolidate. It was too cluttered especially my blogroll. I changed this by trying to shrink the lengths of the lists. Notice that more than one link happens per line.
Color
I knew I wanted a black background. This is to validate BlueRyder’s idea that this blog is dark. Just kidding. Black looks so much cooler or at least a non-white background. Non-white is my text editor at work’s colors for documents. It’ll make it easier to blog at work. Just kidding, again.
The color scheme I chose is mainly black and orange. Unfortunately, this is also the colors for the hometown birds. I have wanted to try out this color scheme out a long time ago, but never had a decent opportunity.
Did you know that the text isn’t purely white? It’s slightly yellow and it compliments the black.
The links are a subtle orange which also compliments the darker main orange color. It’s not the bright one I am used too, but I like it. I hope you too.
Sidebar Tricks
Check out the cache section which is autoatically generated via Blogger tags. I print especially via some javascript.
Mainly the javascript is used to add the ‘|’ after each link printed. For the archive links, I had to create a column effect with javascript. It’s basically every third link I don’t print the ‘|.’ So there’s some programming done here. I wonder if it is taking some time to do this. Perhaps some performance checks needed to executed for those who are still on dialup.
What I like
The layout. The colors. A new blog.
What I don’t like
The CSS. The lack of a proper footer (I wanted another grey bar to rest at the bottom.
