Site redesign

Newer. Better. Bigger. Morer. Leon Paternoster has been rebuilt and given a facelift: it’s time for a site redesign.

September 30th, 2008. Written by Leon. Read the commentary.

As it’s been a whole 3 months or so since the last redesign, I thought it was high time to spend hours communing with the laptop and toiling over PHP functions. I have redesigned the blog.

Features:

  • Integration of Gravatars and bookmarks. I’ve kind of resisted them before — I’m not exactly sure why — but they add a bit of warmth to the design.
  • Readability. I’ve kept a 100% font size (most likely 16 pixels) for body copy, and the traditional blue link colour. Measure and leading are all spick and span. I’ve got over justifying paragraphs.
  • A logo. Of sorts. I’m not very graphical, so I thought I’d have a go at a creating a logo out of plain HTML and CSS. Not quite Jon Tan level wizardry, but I’m pretty happy with it. And it adds colour.
  • A grid. This one’s based on ems: three 17em columns with 3em margins. I’ve written somewhat immodestly about grids in the past, and I still think the reliance on complex grids as an answer to poorly structured content is a bad thing, but I may revisit this subject.
  • Twitter and Delicious. Not sure about this.

This theme was created over a period of about a week, in the company of my two children. The templates were built in 10 minute bursts, sandwiched by feeding, changing and reading. It’s an odd way to work, but actually quite enjoyable.

As ever, your comments are more than welcome.

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Commentary

Written by Sander on October 1st, 2008

Hi Leon, I like your new design. Indeed the logo adds some color to the theme. I very much like the way you did the meta. Big header, sub text and then written by. Nice touch. Although I believe the side bar could use some more (standard) links like recently written. It seems like you’ve managed to create wordpress themes on the fly! Good luck!

Written by Leon on October 2nd, 2008

Hey Sander - always great to read your comments. Yes, I think I’ll add a list of recent posts to post pages. I’ve had a couple of weeks spare in which to do this, so it’s not quite been on the fly, but I’m getting better at making wp themes. Still, I might try and squeeze a ‘traditional’ one (i.e. with the default set up) in over the weekend.

Ta,

— Leon

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mail: leon.paternoster@gmail.com