failing like never before

25Jun/080

New Site Design

I began a major rehaul of my blog's visual appearance two days ago, and I've been tweaking it up until now. My new theme is based mostly on Designer-daily's "Gone Fishing" theme. I decided that my old theme, which was another stock theme from the wordpress themes database, was too "light-colored."

Old visitors may notice that my blog is now significantly darker in color, though still blue. Also, my old "Pure" theme was built to accomadate monitors that have a maximum horizontal resoultion of 800px, whereas my current theme is slightly wider then 800px. In the past I have always tried to make my webpages render nicely on older computers. Now of course, I doubt that anyone still has a monitor with 800x600 resolution, and if they do they probably aren't reading my blog.

I made some changes to the stock "Gone Fishing" theme.

  • I changed the default font-type to Verdana, which in my opinion is a prettier font (for some reason, on my Linux boot, Helvetica looks like a flock of birds crapped on Times New Roman)
  • Changed some font sizes around in the main CSS stylesheet
  • Shrank the right sidebar significantly, thus making the main column much wider. Who the hell needs that much space for a side-navigation bar?
  • Dumped the default banner which depicted a sketch of a fish's mouth, and replaced it with my own custom banner. I really needed an image in there to spiff things up and I thought the fish was kinda ugly, so I stuck in Tux the Linux penguin.

Keeping the stock theme was out of the question, not because I think its ugly, but because I don't want people looking at my blog and seeing a "canned blog."