Blog Re-Design: Phase 1
It's hard to describe my process for re-designing this blog, because there wasn't much of a process involved. It was a lot of trial and error ...
I mainly used Firefox's css editor plug-in, which enabled me to see my revisions immediately, with no fear of overwriting any real documents. I would make revisions in the editor and when I reached a good point, save to a text file to later upload to the site.
LAYOUT
The first thing I wanted to do is move the navigation to the left-hand side of the page. It seemed more intuitive to me and leaves the far right column for further additions. This had to be switched around in the Index page, which was a bit confusing because MoveableType renames their columns: alpha, beta, gamma - not the most intuitive. (Why not col 1, col 2, col 3?) I also wanted to move the navigation items around a bit. It seemed silly to have a search button at the top of the nav with only two entries, so I pushed it to the bottom.
DESIGN
The only design elements I changed were with the colors. I've had a recent affinity for lime green, so I tried to incorporate that early on. It doesn't always play well with others, particularly on a copy-heavy site so I had to scrap it pretty quickly. I found a compromise with the yellow-green used for the header and found a background that would complement it and be soft enough to read the copy on. I'm still not happy with the way it looks and want to play around w/the lime green a bit more. I'm partial to sites w/copy and light backgrounds, dark type. I had a bit of trouble sorting out the navigation background, so I'll need to figure that out first. I'd also like to know how to push the navigation down (or have it scroll down the page w/the content?)