The Adventures of Jessica Sideways

So, some of you have seen the new design and wondered what happened to the blog, the content and all of the fun little features that I have promised over the years that I never really got around to coding in? Well, I have said that I have always wanted to redesign my blog and now, I am getting up off of my tushie (which has years of accumulated sugar from many two litres of pop and a little bit of creme from the couple of bottles of Bailey’s Irish Creme that I downed since I started drinking) and getting it done. I am doing a live redesign of my personal blog testing out numerous settings, styles and I should have a fully finished product in about a fortnight. This redesign means a lot of things, namely fixing things that are more than likely to break due to the swift and seeming spontaneous change from K2 to Automattic’s P2, making sound improvements to the navigation and implementing graphical changes that just make plain sense. Simply put, it is about creating an unique style before the very eyes of my visitors, as well as testing out new techniques I a have always wanted to try but never really got the chance to implement. It is a live redesign in every sense of the word, but unlike the owner of Warpspire, I do not intend to walk you through how I do this. I am not the best of teachers and I would not be as effective as those who have that special gift. However, I do hope that you learn something from the changes that you see take place before your very eyes.

The necessity for a change was growing and I cannot stress enough on how much this site desperately needed a fresh coat of paint as well as a touch of the code monkey wrench. There were so many style elements that I wanted to implement but have been unable to due to how awkward K2 is and I personally believe that most, if not all of the changes I wish to implement will be possible with P2. Also, there were just issues with K2 that just could not be resolved without a total tear down, such as a serious lack of navigation links in K2 that severely crippled navigation. I also felt using a stock style with no intention of doing any redesigning towards it is absolutely tacky for a web designer of my talent. Plus, with my friend Matt kissing my ass about how good of a designer I am, I do feel quite guilty not having a properly designed website for such a long period of time.

So, why did I select P2 for the base of my redesign? Clearly, I do not microblog on this site and to be honest, I have no intention to ever do so in the near or distant future. However, one thing I did like about P2 was it’s crisp, clean style that represented so much of what I wanted to accomplish for my own website. It seemed a much more appropriate base style for my plans than K2 or Sandbox so that is why I have chosen this style to work with. In addition, it will help me to focus on my goal of simplicity, which is something that I have seemed to forget in my forays into designing my site. It is very clean and if I need to use a specific plugin, I can code it in myself and implement it the way I wish.

One of the differences you will notice with this redesign is improved
simplicity in a beautiful design. A part of this simplicity is the fact that much of the content is much more readable, in larger text sizes with a stylesheet that prefers serif fonts. This style only has one sidebar (and frankly, I am thankful for that) and I intend to try to convey as much information via that sidebar as possible while having as little reliance on the sidebar as possible. I fully intend to make a full sitemap available as well as to improve navigation around the site. I feel that there needs to be a more comprehensive archive which allows someone to flip through posts, tags and categories. There also needs to be a related posts option that shows related posts with each and every post.

While I am redesigning the website, I fully intend to flesh out the content as much as humanly possible. There are some areas of my site that simply do not work the way they should. Add in the issue of seriously outdated content and incorrect information in pages that should be regularly updated and you have a site that has been begging for serious renovations for quite some time. So this design is simply more than a wielding of serious web development tools, text editors, photo editors and constant verification of XHTML-compliant status…

Oh yes, there is that, is there not? I am going to try my best to make my site comply with proper web standards. Even though I will most assuredly fail in my task, I will have to do my best to make my site comply with these standards. I am also going to re-evaluate the need of each and every plugin I have installed so that my site may run faster and with less issues. I also intend to nuke a few pages which are not relevant and may no longer be of much use.

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