New year, new design.

New year, new design.

Since we’re a year older here at the BlogRodent’s bolt-hole on the Web (I use the royal “We,” of course, any blame accruing from this blog is entirely mine–my wife happily observes), I thought it’d be a good time to effect a complete redesign. My WordPress install has gone from something pre-1.5 to something post 2.0 while my blog template has remained steadily prehistoric, and the maker of the old theme had dropped off the Web. It’s long been time for an upgrade just on technical reasons, alone. Visually, I was due for an upgrade not long after launching. :: sigh ::

After carefully pawing through several dozen WordPress themes I settled on several I liked and tried them all out. If you were browsing the blog last Thursday night, you probably noticed the design dance the site was going through. Or maybe you thought you needed medication?

I settled on the WuCoco theme designed by Mike Lococo for a few reasons: 1) it was three-column, and I wasn’t ready to leave that design structure. 2) It was WordPress 2.0-ready, so I didn’t have to worry about the theme breaking in three weeks. 3) It was widget-enabled, which would allow me to fiddle with the contents of my sidebars without having to muck around in the template. And, more importantly, 4) It was very CSS-driven, no tables, and visually pleasing. Unfortunately, it’s a big design. Anybody surfing with less than 800×600 resolution will be profoundly irritated right now.

Sorry. I’m a big man. I need a big blog.

I carried over the mast head from my old design, and I superimposed it on one of my macro photos, heavily Photoshopped, of course, giving me a nice industrial-grunge feel. (As though my weblog were somewhat postmodern, edgy, and cynically urban. Right. That’ll only fool the newbies for about thirty seconds.) I had to modify things a bit to give the theme a blue color scheme, and I added a footer for my button-junk. Aside from that, Mike Lococo has provided us a great new design. Thanks, Mike.

So, sorry for all the flux and chaos, but I think the dust is pretty much settled now. I hope you like the new design. I certainly do.

Rich.

[tags]BlogRodent, WordPress, design, wucoco, lococo, design, theme, redesign[/tags]

2 thoughts on “New year, new design.

  1. Marc V

    Looks purty good. I’m a 2-column man myself. 3 columns tends to make for skinny posts, and some folks don’t like the near-constant scrolling to read a post. It also limits you if you want to include pictures with a post.

    If you have ads and a bunch of items in different categories, then 3 columns helps support all the extra “stuff”. The red links on blue background stands out well.

  2. Rich Post author

    Thanks for stopping by and giving me an evaluation, Marc. I appreciate it. By the way, nice redesign on your weblog!

    I think my weblog is probably too cluttered, but I feel paranoid about people not being able to discover content they are interested in, so I have so many widgets going on that it may be information overload. I’m not sure. That said, however, usability research does indicate that shorter column width for the content of your page makes it easier to read–not harder. Forcing the eye to travel too far accross the page produces too much eyestrain.

    But, then, so does writing too much, which I’m prone to do. Oh well.

    Thanks, again.

    Rich
    BlogRodent

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