(If you are reading this on RSS, click over to the site to see the changes I’m talking about.)
I had originally commissioned the design of my blog back in October 2008. The designers took a ridiculously long time and by March 2009 I told them to either ship or forget it.
What they ended up delivering was acceptable, but there were always things about it I didn’t like. However, I am also a very serious procrastinator so I kept putting off getting the changes made.
The biggest complaint people had was reading white text on a black background. The idea behind having a black background was that it is better for displaying photos, which I still think is true. However, it isn’t the best when it comes to displaying text. I noticed that with the black background, it was very difficult to differentiate between bold text and regular text.
Another thing I never liked was the way captions were displayed under images. The old captions were a baby blue box which was under each photo. I didn’t like the color and I didn’t like how I had to compensate for the caption when figuring out how the text would flow around an image in an article.
Now captions float on top of the images, which I think not only looks better but makes it easier to do the layout.
In total, this is something less than getting a totally new site developed and something more than just a minor tweak. That is what I’m calling this the 3.5 version of the site.
I want to give a big thanks to Chris Richardson (aka The Aussie Nomad) who just started a company that does backend services for websites: RTW Labs. I’m very pleased with the job he did.
Please let me know what you think of the new layout and any suggestions you might have.