December 8, 2009
Design within Reach
[Editor's Note: This was the last post of the temporary blog I set up on one of my other sites, which I've preserved in full here. Wordpress conveniently solved all of the problems below; see next post for more details.]
Good news, a blog re-design is in the works; hopefully these are the final days of this ad hoc setup.
The portfolio layout is good for some things, but a blog is not one of them. (I’ll also acknowledge that the portfolio layout is even better when there’s a portfolio, which is coming soon…er or later.)
- Readability: First and foremost, it’s just hard to read the damn thing (both in terms of visual appearance and irritatingly convoluted, often exhausting and needlessly periphrastic writing style). I’m thinking classic black-on-white text for the new site. The writing itself, however, will remain as pedantic and ponderous as ever, if not more so—I like to make my readers work a little bit.
- Image (re)sizing: Future layout will be bigger and ideally will include lightbox image viewer (another easy one).
- Quote / Caption / List consistency: An easy fix; really, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have done this already.
- Mobile device support: I have yet to browse the site on a smartphone, but I can’t imagine it looks good. This will require some work, possibly more than I care to do right now.
- Cross-browser support: Similarly, I have yet to view the site in IE. It ain’t perfect in Safari either—Safari wants no part of that object.style script…
- Proper image pre-loading: Probably coincides with cross-browser support.
I think I’ve enumerated all of the major issues, but obviously I would appreciate any reader input or suggestions. If you haven’t had the balls to call me out on shit thus far, now’s the time to do it.
Filed under: Design · Tags: meta, web design
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