Spent Saturday doing mostly-web-stuff, which was mostly-fun, before going to Tom’s Birthday party in the city. It was a blast, but, when the party moved from laid-back, Zen-vibe Park to quasi-hipster Brass Monkey, Schmoo and I had a hard time keeping up. Maybe because we’re getting old, but probably because the music was so loud we had to yell at each other at the top of our lungs (at times in Scottish brogue).
Sunday at the Village Church where Sam gave a 60-minute presentation on the capital-e End times and I gave a 4-minute presentation about our “web presence”:http://villagechurchnyc.com/. Got some feedback and an offer of some help from “Josh Clayton”:http://typefield.com/ to post some photography on the site. I can’t wait to kick around some ideas with him.
Napped for a few hours, which subsequently means I haven’t been able to sleep yet, so, of course, it’s time for a site redesign. 
“Fickle”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/12/22/facelift/, I know, but while discussing our site design with Tom on Saturday — okay, after wildly gesturing and lip-reading over the booming techno — he reminded me of our initial design before the conversion to WordPress. It looked “something like this”:http://kennsarah.net/archives1/2005/01/09/would_you_buy_a_500_mac/index.php but featured a big, fun photo at the top of the page that I periodically updated. Tom and I agreed that the idea was still good, so the gears began to turn.
During my geek-out session on Saturday, I discovered the “plaintxtBlog”:http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/plaintxtblog/, a clever minimalist theme with a penchant for typography. After installing and playing with it, I was sold: I took the new theme and did some hacking to pull in the latest photo from Flickr from our account tagged with the word “featured”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/featured/. All I have to do to update the photo is upload it to Flickr and tag it and it’s automatically resized and shows up on the site — which feels really maintainable.
There are some things I miss about the other design, and I’m not totally happy with everything with the new design, but I think this design has got some potential. What do you think?
Interesting. Hmm. I do like that all the links are back . . . it’s perhaps a little too text-heavy for my taste . . . but then again, I haven’t done much with my own — I’m not even sure what I want my blog to look like, much less yours!
P.S. I do like the “something like this” link (to the $500 mac entry), for what it’s worth . . .
Kyleen, thanks — and thanks for being honest.
A couple of questions:
What did you mean when you said all the links are “back”? I’m pretty sure everything in the sidebars now were on the old design, but I could be wrong.
What did you like about the “something like this” design? Was it the colors? Comment treatment? Typography? All of the above?
I dig it. The current featured photo of your chop licking dog is a beyond awesome photo. You can take a zillion (yes a zillion photos) and one like that is hard to find.
I agree that the photo is awesome. Over the past few months the links listed on your homepage have been re-organized a few times (I think, am I imagining it?) — at one point there was a listing of other people’s blogs, which was then consolidated into the one “weblogs” link, which I couldn’t find for a few days . . . which I only noticed because I usually come to your site first and then click through to check other sites (man, I really need some sort of dashboard for RSS feeds . . .). And I like both the color and the typography of the “something like this” design. I think margin and blank space are important, but I think that perhaps this current layout is a bit textually overwhelming whereas the “something like this” design has a bit too much dead space (maybe just making the center column a bit wider so you don’t have to scroll so far down for the comments). So, um, yeah, the picture here is AWESOME, and I like the layout, simplicity, color, and typography (not to be confused with topography, heh) of the green design. Have I babbled enough?
Kyleen,
Thanks.
We did have links on the homepage, on and off. I actually took them down from the old design because I wasn’t doing a good job maintaining them — there were links to sites that I almost never visit there. That’s the frustrating thing with bookmarks: once they’re bookmarked, they’re almost always ignored. I’ll see if maybe I can get something else going.
As for the RSS reader well, I’m going to geek out again about this real soon, but you may want to check out netvibes.com in the meantime. Makes feeds happy.
Yeah, a big criticism of the “green” design was that it didn’t make much of the space. At the time, I was coming off a jumbled three-column layout, so it was very peaceful for me, but not economical.
I’ve been tweaking this design a bit to get it to look better. The latest article of our site now shows up on the front page in full now so you can get to the new content fast. I still need to work more on the summary stuff below it, though.
The footer, I think, has potential to be cool (links to favorite books and CDs would be _hottt_). But, I’m only poking at this thing when I have time which I’m mostly frittering away on other projects.