So what's new?

Well the most obvious change is the visual look of things. The old design was for the most part a highly adapted version of the base MT templates. I moved stuff around, changed some functionality, had different styling for the way entries were displayed, and had a much fancier menu/banner. But it was still just a Frankenstein-version of the default templates.

"Version 3" is much more my own creation, designed and developed by me from the ground up. It's not perfect and it might not actually stay too long, but it was a very good learning experience. I'll definitely do things differently when working on my brother's site and 722WebDesign. With this new design I created a couple mock-ups on paper but for the most part I designed and built the site at the same time. Big mistake. Any minor changes took forever to make, and there were a ton of them as the process went on. Plus things I was visualizing in my head and on paper came out a lot different when the images had to be made and the CSS coded.

At least as important is the new functionality of the site. If you notice the new sidebar includes a lot of random information. In addition to the main weblog you're reading now, there's three more blogs controlling the information over there. There's one for my daily quicklinks, for everythign I'm doing, and for all the recent photos I'm taking. Pretty cool in that it automatically updates those sidebars anytime I add an entry. Works well and will be relatively easy to maintain once I get it up and running. Setting those up and getting them to work right was one of the more time consuming parts of the process, so any future redesigns should be able to be done without messing with that.

Still more to come

Like I said above, there's still some fixes to be done. But there will also be more design additions. Since I've got the IE-only stylesheet up and running, I'm going to be adding some things to standards-compliant browsers to make the site look a little better there. If you notice the background on the homepage, it really takes some of the bite out of the bright red backround and I like what it adds to the look of the rounded rectangles.

Of course if you're still using Internet Explorer, you'll be missing out on most of that.

Right now the individual entry pages are kinda bland, so I'll be sprucing those up (especially the comment styling) and more content is needed on pages such as the about page. There also might be other changes as I try to add a little color to things.

What do you think?

Like it? Don't like it? Have any constructive criticism?

I know it's "too red" so don't mention that, but if there's any changes or additions you think would make it look better please let me know in the comments. And like I said above if you have any major problems let me know about those too.

What's in it for you? Well the first six of you that comment will get a Gmail invite if you want one. Make sure you use a real e-mail address or I'll have no way to send you the invite. And it's gotta be a real comment too, have something to say or you won't get one.

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