posted 2007/10/24 at 19:59
Ariel recently redesigning her Website has me thinking that it might be time for me to tweak the design of the .org. This wouldn't be a major redesign on the level of what Ariel did, or my launch of ".org v3.0" earlier this year, but I do want to make some changes. There are some things I know that I want to do (such as make the main body text bigger, a criticism I've heard plenty of since the last redesign), but there are other tweaks that I'm not so certain of, and I'm sure that there are lots of other things I could do that I'm not thinking of that you all might suggest to me. First, though, let me go over some of my own concerns in terms of the redesign.
In addition to generally making my blog entries longer and trying to cut down on the less intelligent entries that I tended to lapse into during tough times of my life, one of my main goals in the last major redesign was to switch to a white background to look a bit more professional, since I finally began to view the .org as an extension of my professional career at that point. As much as I loved version 2.1 of the .org (sample) because it successfully integrated my personal colour scheme (black, deep purple and dark green) with graphics I felt communicated various aspects of my life (the leaves on the sidebar and the "mist" behind the main body text). I knew I had to switch to a white background to look more professional, though, so I tried to keep the colours and graphics in the redesign in a more subdued way. That being said, I've never been that happy with the two leaf backgrounds I've been using in the new design. I can't even put my finger on exactly what it is that bothers me about them; they just don't seem to convey the leaf/nature theme as well as the previous design did. For that matter, the backgrounds look a bit different now that I'm testing this new flat panel for my folks, so I should probably learn how to do some colour calibration on the monitors here soon.
The other thing I've been thinking of is perhaps switching all of .photography over to Flickr. I've always been envious of the increased networking Ariel gets through her Flickr sidebar on her Website, and I'd like to think that perhaps being active on Flickr might increase traffic here. (Even though my DeviantArt account has yet to yield similar results.) The downside to this would be that I would lose the extra banner ad impressions I get by self-hosting my pictures, and while the amount of money I get from running ads on the .org isn't all that great, I don't think the potential gain in traffic from Flickr would make up for the loss of not getting an ad impression with every picture view.
Those are my primary concerns, so if any of you have any advice for those, or other suggestions for how to improve the .org's design, please reply to this entry. I probably won't be doing too much redesign work over the next few days because I'll have a lot of papers from my students to review starting tomorrow, but I'll probably sneak in the odd tweak here and there when I'm on break from looking at papers.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon