Yeah, I haven´t blogged in two weeks. I know. Not that I haven´t tried. There are over 30 Drafts waiting to be finished, but the time periods where I was able to write just weren´t long enough to finish those.
The most obvious thing that I spent my time on is the new design here. It´s only half finished but I feel like it already looks quite better than the one I had before. I like the header (which you can´t see in its whole glory when your screen resolution is less then 1680 wide btw), the featured gallery transitions and the custom sidebar features . I´m not so sure about the border for the featured gallery and the widget headers, gonna take a look at those again when some time has passed. I haven´t touched on the navigation, the actual content area and the footer yet, so look out for a couple of more changes soon.
The header reflects my personality. The Warlock, the Print Designer, the coding cat, cat lover, the Skater, egoshooter gamer and much more. The Eagle you see on the right is from the city arms of my hometown. I´m not sure if I´m finished yet cause including hardcore music, actual blogging and honory commitment would be nice too, but it already looks packed, so I don´t think there will be much more added.
I´ll try something cloudy for the Navigation first. If this doesn´t work out I´ll give something grunge-ish or ducttape-ish a try. I think I will make the actual content area 600 px wide, right now it´s 550 and some pictures from old posts don´t show up in their entirety. Have to check how it looks, but i definitely feel more comfortable with a wider content area than with having to resize all the old pictures. White as background will probably stay the same or a very white paper texture, but I will use other graphics as borders. They will basicly have the same purpose of displaying ripped paper, just a little bit more ripped, like you would imagine paper to look after it had a fight with an angry german hardcore kid.
I really don´t know what to do with the look of the footer. I´ll take the tag cloud out and put a contact form in the right box. i´ll also use rounded corners with the same radius as the container. Probably it will end up with sketched graphics from a wallpaper I made with the silhouette of trees, a house, powerlines and birds. That´s what I had in the mock up, but i don´t work strictly after my mockups if i´m unsure about something. I first had a tv as border for the featured gallery and separated from the rest of the design, it really looked great, but within the design it just didn´t fit. The residual image in the transition between the posts is still here to stay. Definitely. Also thought about using 10% transparent pngs as post-images in the future to keep them animated.
The custom sidebar will get a flash-navigation for my categories/personas also including the rss link. I really can´t describe it, but it will just look great and add something special to the surfing experience that you can´t achieve just by coding. I hate websites completely built in flash, but single elements can be a great enhancement of the user experience.
This Theme, which i call GermanPervert btw, was based on the American Conservative Theme by Jeremy Buff. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for making this theme and also for assuring me to documentate any changes he´s making for future versions. I think it´s important that people who make customizations don´t lose them when upgrading, so i´m always asking if someone documentates the changes before I touch a theme.What do you think of the Redesign?
It´s designed for Firefox. It looks way different in IE, but it doesn´t look broken so I will probably not do anything to make it look exactly the same.
BTW: Yeah, I´m still working on an own theme to release, but i will not use it on my own site. I realized that the needs of the average blogger user are not the same that I have and that a theme I use has to work differently than it should work for other people. Stay tuned. Sneakpeak next week or so.
BTW2: Please notice that this design is really only half finished. So if you want to mention it somewhere on the web, please have little patience and wait for the actual end result, because i´d hate to see it featured somewhere without being finished. Thanks.
