Sans Style

If you’ve vis­ited my site (as opposed to read­ing only via feed reader) today, you may have noticed that the site is very, well, naked, stripped down to the basic style included with The­sis.

I did that because I was get­ting a lit­tle sick of the pre­vi­ous blue-themed cus­tomiza­tion that I was run­ning here. I know I’m no designer, and those styles were sim­ply my best attempt at some­thing other than the default. How­ever, as one of the pil­lars of the The­sis com­mu­nity, I think my per­sonal site’s style ought to be just a lit­tle more impres­sive than that.

So I stripped away the pre­vi­ous style so that it could no longer sit there lookin’ all mediocre, found I site whose style I could shame­lessly steal base my own entirely orig­i­nal code off of. And I’m ven­tur­ing forth into areas I’ve never tread before as an ama­teur designer — using The­sis’ full-width frame­work and a healthy dose of CSS 3, for example.

Oh, and the pri­mary col­ors will be pur­ples and pinks.

I also make no guar­an­tee that the site will look decent at all in any ver­sion of Inter­net Explorer, as usual. My Win­dows comp — a Dell of less than two years of age — takes over twenty min­utes to start up, and I’d rather just let it rest in peace. I’ll be test­ing the style in Fire­fox, Safari, Omni­Web, and other Mac browsers. My faith might be his­tor­i­cal, but my cod­ing style doesn’t have to be.

Some things that I’m doing for this redesign:

• I’m going to be serv­ing as much sta­tic con­tent as pos­si­ble from a sub­do­main to allow users’ browsers to down­load more at once. I don’t yet have enough traf­fic to jus­tify using (& pay­ing for) Ama­zon Cloud­Front (which Dreamhost sup­ports with just a few clicks) or some other con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem, but hav­ing the con­tent already seg­re­gated on a sub­do­main will make it that much eas­ier should I ever decide to upgrade in the future.

• I’m orga­niz­ing my cus­tomiza­tions bet­ter as I plan on releas­ing my The­sis cus­tom files (via a Cre­ative Com­mons license). I’d like to think that at least some of what I’m doing will be inter­est­ing or even use­ful to others!

• I’m re-thinking which fea­tures of The­sis I use. Sure, the mul­ti­me­dia box is a great fea­ture, but do I really need it, at least in its cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion? Like­wise, I ditched the The­sis nav menu entirely and used a greatly trimmed down, hand-rolled menu. Yes, I lose the abil­ity to cus­tomize it via Word­Press’ back­end, but does that hurt my feel­ings? Nope.

• I haven’t started on this yet, but I want to make my site more inter­est­ing to vis­i­tors, espe­cially first-timers. I’m eye­ing a num­ber of plu­g­ins which will help to do this. I may be strip­ping a few plu­g­ins too. Along with releas­ing my cus­tomiza­tions, I guess I could share a list of which plu­g­ins I’m using too.

And there are prob­a­bly more, they just aren’t com­ing to mind right now. And I know that all this has prob­a­bly been a bit bor­ing, so I’ll leave you with a sneak-preview of the new design. Keep in mind I’m actively work­ing on this so the final result might change quite a bit:

Bonus points if you can iden­tify the site which has inspired me. ;)