Redesign of ianhoar.com
Welcome to redesign three of my blogs history, I hope you like it. Everything has been redesigned, styled and coded from the ground up. The reasons for this new layout were to bring the site up to date, make it more user friendly and make it pop a little more. I think I have achieved my goals, although as any designer will tell you, it’s hard not to nitpick your own work to death. There gets a point in the design cycle where you have to start coding otherwise you would end up scraping your new design all together and starting a new one.
My new design is larger in every aspect. Larger width, bigger fonts, fatter masthead, more prominent navigation and taller footer. I also wanted to simply the site. I found the old site was too busy and parts of it always felt like after thoughts. This time around I made a concentrated effort to layout almost everything in Photoshop before hand and then mark it up all on a static HTML page before applying WordPress tags. Headers, block quotes, preformatted text, comments, twitter posts, form fields, buttons and images were all visually tested in Photoshop first. In the past I have done all the graphic elements and worried about things like form and comment styling afterwords. There is something to be said for both approaches, and I don’t think one has more merit than the other, but I wanted to really feel this new design from the start. No after thoughts. That said, I did end up tweaking a few elements and even forgetting to Photoshop a few parts, and there will always be future additions that are after thoughs, but I think I started with a solid base. I’ve tried to keep my layout flexible enough to anticipate future fine tuning.
A new design and a new focus
With the new design comes a new focus. In the future I will be writing more in depth tutorials and content. I will be posting less banter and chatter, that’s what Twitter is for. That doesn’t mean I won’t still have the occasional gadget review or rant, but expect a lot more web related content. I also hope to post some YouTube tutorials if I ever get up the courage.
