Kristopher Louie

It’s Official

September 01, 2008 — Design, Updates

Finally, after several months of creative block and getting backed up with client work, I finally managed to finish the crunch work on my own site and project. It’s taken far too long to release this new version, and failing to block it off, the design isn’t entirely ‘fresh’ to some people.

I’m entitling this design Fresh & Me which might sound a little…lame to some, but I thought it was appropriate. It’s my second entirely hand-made WP theme, using some advanced techniques that I’ve learned along the way. I tried to keep it very simple, and then I was running into a ‘I really don’t like it’ so I changed it up some and this was the final concept.

The main color of choice is Pantone 380 C and the three fonts presented are Violation Script (logo), Gill Sans (headlines) and Helvetiva Neue (content). I was original going to use SRG Clean Archives but then stumbled upon an old post from DevLounge “Custom Archive Queries For WordPress” which came as a blessing, and now my Archives page will be simple and clean. Something that I’m looking forward to updating is my directory page. Other than linking to friends and designers that I admire, I’m hoping to compile a large list of resourceful sites for designers, old and new. Unfortunately I haven’t touched the portfolio section, but rest assured it’ll be there in the near future. I promise.

I thought I was finished with this theme a little over a week ago, but while reading digg and reading articles on design, I landed on an old article that made me realize that I had a lot of flaws. If you haven’t read RA Project’s “Things to Avoid: What Makes Me Nervous When Reading Your Blog” then you might want to read and double-check (followup with DevLounge’s “15 Design Decisions That Annoy People“).

With earlier designs, people had told me that my earlier designs had font sizes that were too large, so I returned to the  font-size of 12. One of the things that I agree with Simonne is the fact that a lot of sites do have small font sizes, and to me I kind of feel like 12 is small on the screen. I increased the font-size to 14 and I feel somewhat comfortable with that size.

The next object on the list was the RSS feed. I didn’t forget it, I had it on the sidebar as just a text-link. While digging for inspiration few months back, I had seen a lot of sites with kickass RSS feed buttons, and so I figured that I’d try creating my own and it might not be the best button ever created but it works, and it’s there!

I spent the a few hours Labor Day weekend configuring my comments section so that they appeared cleaner, and then I learned that I was one, of many, that did not have a “subscribe to comments” feature. I was getting frustrated when I couldn’t find out how to do this on my own via wordpress.org, but luckily I found Mark Jaquith’s Subscribe to Comments plugin.

And the last thing that I never really used was “Related Posts”. For something that doesn’t take a lot of effort (it’s a plugin for christ sakes), I really don’t know why I never bothered with it. I guess my reason was being lazy, and that’s not a good reason.

And with that said, I am planning to write an article on (Re-)Designing a Blog. It’ll be my first real article! Also, my previous readers of my personal blog faraway words, you’ll have to register in order to view my daily rants. I apologize for the inconvenience, however I want to make my blog more professional.

Tags: Blog Design, Fresh & Me