Stephen
Washburn

A redesign

Jun 18, 2013 •

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on a redesign of this site. I liked the old design, but there were a few issues: it wasn’t very responsive, it had a large background image that I made just because I could, and I tried something in the header with ‘responsive text’ which didn’t work very well. As soon as I decided to redesign the site I knew there were a few posts that would serve to inform the new look:

  1. The Design of a Site Meant to be Read by Ben Brooks > If you make your site readable, people won’t mind reading it, and if people don’t mind reading your site, then you have a chance at gaining new readers. So make your site readable.

  2. Designing blogs for readers by Matt Gemmell > There’s no higher priority than readable text

There really isn’t much more for me to say about the redesign. I tried to take their points to heart, and I believe I followed them pretty closely1. I tried not to slavishly copy Matt’s design, but if I’m honest there seems to be only so much variation possible once you’ve stripped all the excess features away and optimized for readability.

One piece of Ben’s advice that I didn’t take was to pick an accent color, so I think there’s still some work left to be done, but I’m pretty happy with where the design is at for now and any additional changes should be more subtle.

  1. …with the exception of including images in the midst of the text, I include images or videos infrequently enough that I feel like it fits better to include them. If that changes in the future I may have to re-evaluate.