Redesign – coming along.

Yes, I’ve been hard at work this weekend thinking about this site’s redesign and I’ve come up with a few ideas. I think the new motif will be the King from a playing card. Something similar to this:

I’m going for three columns, fixed at 810 pixels. It may not fit on everybodys screen but the important stuff (i.e. my posts) will be on the left. The amount of users still stuck on a 800×600 display is minimal and I’ll make a seperate style-sheet for handheld device users. The content area will have a white background, whereas the body background will be very pale blue. I’ve yet to decide whether to do a flashy fade from background to content. It’s easy to do with the fixed width but may end up looking out of place. Simplicity is the key. There will be much more white space, the text will be much smaller, the headers bigger and the links will be a different colour.

One issue is the other pages I current have linked on the left. It took me ages to get that folder effect (neglecting graphic design in the process) but I don’t get that many visitors to those pages:
‘Current eBay Auctions’ is still popular and bring many hits from eBay itself, I’ll be keeping something similar in the redesign.
‘House Records For Sale’ has 60 users landing on it every month but I haven’t sold a record from it or updated it in over a year so it’s time for that to go.
The ‘ID These Tunes’ section used to be very big but all but two of the tracks were identified so it’s time for that go too.
The ‘Photo Album’ page is great, being all my photos of course, but due to the invention of services such as Flickr, allowing me to embed photos in the rightbar, this may have to go. I have to think of my bandwidth too!
The less said about ‘Links’ the better. Half of them are dead and today was the first time even I’ve looked at it for months. What with the services such as Digg (which embarrasingly I’ve yet to look into) this page is redundant.

A major design flaw with this current design is that the links I’ve described above have so much prominence on the main page. When I crowbarred the blog into this design it felt right but as the blog has now come to overtake the rest of the site in importance and hits they now look like useless relics from my previous design. So out they go (apart from the auction page).

More soon!