‘Stirring dull roots with spring rain’
I’ve been thinking about Web page design recently, in connection with a couple of projects (one of which will go live in about a week, I hope; the other in the summer). I reflected that the design of this blog was not good in a couple of ways, and had been unchanged in over four years. So here’s a new design; I hope you like it…
At the same time, I’ve added a couple of pages. ‘My writing’ and ‘My preaching and speaking’. Both are shameless marketing: links to places you can buy my books, or mp3s and even a DVD of me speaking.
Comments on changes welcome; if you happened to be browsing this blog mid-afternoon, I apologise that the theme design changed repeatedly over one half hour!
I very much like the clarity and simplicity of the overall layout. I wonder if the boldness of the blue background to the boxes in the left-hand column, and the very fact that it is on the left, isn’t a bit distracting: it’s what the eye is drawn to first, and repeatedly drawn back to. Given that navigation-by-menu is not the primary way in which people will want to read the blog (rather than the reading-what’s-currently-at-the-top method), I’d suggest that those elements should be on the right, and that they should be visually muted. In that vein, I also wonder whether there is some way in which the avatar icons of commenters in the ‘recent comments’ panel could be more visually restrained? In fact, given that next to nobody uses a recognisable image for their avatar, I wonder whether that box could be text only?
Thanks, Mike. I’ve moved the sidebar back to the right; the WP theme has limited colour options, only one of which could be called ‘muted’; when I look at it, the menu stuff blends too far into the body for my taste, but I tend to the bold on these things.
The avatars: you just don’t like yours, do you?! No, I take the point; unfortunately two of our girls have just posted on here to see what avatars they got, so they have to stay for a few weeks, at least…
Links to mp3s and DVDs!?! 🙂
Next you’ll be saying you have a book on marriage for sale 🙂
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Pick any pseudonym you like, Lynn, I get the email addresses of comment posters…
I presume you’ll have a blogroll of some sort at some point, given your previous post about British theobloggers.
Finally got hold of The Holy Trinity, by the way…
I agree with Mike that the blue sidebar draws a lot of the attention of the viewer. This could be balanced if the top header had some color in it. Your new blog twystematics.org shows this color balance at the top nicely.
But in general the clean and simple layout is a nice one when the content is the focus, as it is on your blog.