New Clothes

I’ve finally got round to implementing my own site theme. Although I’m not entirely happy with it and it still needs some tweaking on certain pages it had been unchanged for two weeks on the test site and with time looking to be limited over the next month or so I thought it was time to take the plunge.

The main idea behind the theme was to keep things simple, increase white space and drop the graphics. I’m far preferring sites with little or no graphics on them so that was my main aim. At the same time I wanted the theme to be a little wider than most others to take advantage of my desktops and also those of most of my visitors (thanks Mint). Cross browser compatibility was also important as more than 50% of the real visitors to the site are on IE and around 10% on Safari so I wanted to make sure it looked much the same across all platforms (thanks Parallels). It mostly does with some tweaking still to do to suit IE6.

I’ve also dropped the number of plugins I have installed and load times have been greatly reduced. The about page probably takes the most time although a misbehaving last.fm plugin has been disabled which helps. I’ve also created a tumblelog site which is acting as a ‘lifelog’ pulling together a number of feeds. I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and with new functionality being added frequently and paid for features in the pipeline I can’t see me dropping it. Indeed I’ll probably register a new domain just for the lifelog.

So there you are, hope you like it. I can’t promise it will stay for long as I can be pretty fickle about what I like and dislike but it will do for now and at least meets some of the objectives I set out with. Now I just need to resist the temptation to constantly change.