“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

I just replaced the theme I had re-launched this site with just over a week ago.  That’s the problem with web development—it’s so easy to make changes that I find myself tweeking the site instead of doing other things.

While the previous site was fine, it wasn’t my own.  I bought a theme and re-worked it.  Nothing wrong with this; I often recommend reworking themes, but in this case—for my own site—I decided, after the fact (and over 20 hours of work), that it wasn’t the way I wanted to go.

Process

I started with the grid of the homepage and placed borders around everything so I could see the margins and padding.  The previous theme was a little too tight, so I designed in more white space and created a two-column design instead of three.  This give more room for the content and allowed me to increase the font-size a bit.

I then worked on the header region, creating a shorter space for the logo and site navigation.  I’ve enjoyed designs I’ve recently come across that minimizes space requirements for header stuff, allowing users to get to the real purpose of the web site quicker.

Main site navigation went through a few versions before deciding, again, on a minimalistic approach.  Many sites are using a tab-based navbar, so I decided to steer the other direction and keep it simple.  I then followed up by placing the site navigation in the footer region also.

The color scheme stems from the basic and white with the black moved a little toward gray.  For a third color, I originally used a shade of purple, but in the end opted for a brilliant blue.  As I’m using that is only a few places, it counters the starkness of black and white well.

Still to do

I’ll be adding a portfolio section soon, but I need to rethink how I want to present that.  I also may be combining the “articles” and “blog” sections as I’m not sold on having those independent.  Expanding categories and using them to selectively display content seems to be the way I’m leaning.  I’m also going to do something with the image region on the homepage, possible a little rollover effect which displays a color version of the image.