Redesign

I’ve known that my website design has been lacking for a while, but never cared. Behold, the new and improved, css-based website.

Design

After months of reading about the death of tables for formatting, I decided to redo the website I made in “Computing for Engineers.” This time, it’d be beautiful. There’s not a single table in this website so far. While it’s true that I did borrow some, the website you see now is relatively close to the way I pictured it.

One of the most difficult choices was between two and three columns. Ideally, I will make a two-column layout and use it for articles; there just aren’t that many uses for the other two columns on article pages.

Graphics

For the banner/title graphic, I went through my deviantArt gallery looking for an image I feel represents me. Eventually, I settled on the female wallpaper “Fractal Goddess.” Careful cropping and coloring to fit the black/green color scheme has given me something that works well. Other graphics were created or (more likely) borrowed as needed.

Code reuse

There are a few things I don’t know how to do yet. I’m relatively new to PHP, but I was able to use it to simplify development. Throughout the website, the header, footer, right column, and “quick links” are each included at the server. Maintaining a “quick links” section spread across several pages is simply bad design. Ideally, all of the common elements of each page would be included from some file or another. Ideally, I’ll find and read a guide to good webpage design using PHP.

What’s next?

Search Upgrades. The search box searches google for whatever you put into it. There’s an empty space that I intented on putting a “web/this site” radio button in, but that’s in a separate div section. Anyone who can figure that one out gets a cookie. Update 10.02.2006: This has been fixed.

Social networking. Quick links to post an article or page to del.icio.us, digg, etc would be a good use for the middle column. Update 10.03.2006: This has been fixed.

Comments. I think that a way for users to comment on articles would drastically supplement this blog. Unfortunately, I don’t know where to go on that one. That might be a potential use of the second column in articles.

A new day has dawned.

Literally, it’s one in the morning. Figuratively, I’ve got the framework to share (and learn) knowledge in things I hold dear to me.