July 20, 2009
New look for heisel.org
This Web site was looking old, seriously old. So I finally sat down and redesigned for the first time since college.
I started off by doing some wireframes in Balsamiq. It was nice enough, but I feel like it’s targeted more at desktop or mobile application developers than at Web designers. Still, it fit my bill:
- It was relatively cheap
- It ran on Linux and OSX (it’s an Adobe AIR application)
- It output is easily versionable text-based files (in this case XML)
I set up a repository on GitHub, but because I’m obstinate I used hg-git to actually check out and modify my repo.
After the wireframes I rolled some HTML mockups by hand and got to know Blueprint CSS very well. In my case I only ended up writing 70 lines of my own CSS.
The last step was setting up a clone of my WordPress instance and developing the actual theme, which ended up taking most of my time. The WordPress theme development docs are not terribly concise or easy to navigate, but then I’m spoiled by Django’s documentation.
Side note: After spending the last three or four years developing in Python, Django and occasionaly Ruby I was surprised to find that I still remembered most of PHP’s syntax. I’d like those brain cells back, please.
About the design itself — the goal was minimal, as bloody well minimal as I could make it.
So minimal is what we’ve got. One, count it, one column – in this economy who can afford two? I originally had elaborate plans to aggregate activity from the other sites I live at on the Web, but that’s why Sir Lee gave us <a href>. So we’ve got a sparse home page that shows you the latest post, Tweet and bookmarks, plus some links.
Hope you enjoy it — I’m glad to be rid of the crazy dashed box and the floating ghostly Spirit of St. Louis.
Filed under: Site News,Technology,Web design
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