I’ve never been called a whore before but there’s always a first time for everything. I told my friend that I was going to be making a new layout for my site. That was when she called me a layout whore. She is working on getting a personal site up as well, to showcase her web designs and her modeling portfolio. I encouraged her to get a website up since it’s a good way to showcase her talents. So the countdown to the launch of her new site and my new layout starts now.
Like I mentioned in my audio blog yesterday, this will be version 10 of my site. I plan on sticking with the two column layout that most blogs have. I think the two column layout is best for organizing content that a blog has. The actual blog entries will be displayed on the left hand side while the links and other stuff will be a smaller column on the right hand side. The menu will be placed just under the banner since I find it more convenient to have it up there.
The Firefox logo is my way of hinting that the new layout will be optimized for Firefox. I don’t know if the developers over at Microsoft have made IE compatible with web standards yet but Firefox seems to be doing a good job at it. I don’t want to have to throw in hacks and tricks in order to display things correctly in IE. The new layout should look fine in Firefox but IE might have some minor problems rendering it properly. I don’t think I’m going to spend too much time worrying about fixing those problems. About 60% of the visitors are currently using Firefox anyway but since there are still considerably a large percentage of people using IE, I might fix it up a little.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to leave the visitors with IE out of it. I’ll try to fix up things the best I can but if it’s something minor, I’m not going to bother with it too much. And for those with IE7, I don’t have that browser so I don’t know how it’ll turn out when display with that. Also, there are a few other browsers out there as well (Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Netscape) which I won’t be testing my new layout with.
If something doesn’t render properly, I’m hoping that people will tell me but I rarely get feedback regarding my site. I remember there was another site that takes screenshot of your site and show you how it’ll look like under the various browsers. Unfortunately, I forgot to bookmark that page. That site would have definitely save me the trouble of having to download and install multiple browsers.
As you can see from the screenshot, I’m going back towards dark colours. I like dark colours but I don’t know why exactly. On the drawing board, I started with some light colours but then I just scratched all of that and went dark. The colours that you see aren’t final. They’re just there to give me an idea of what looks good together. Black and blue is a rare combination for me. Usually I use black and red while blue goes with white. You can see that in version 8 and version 9 layouts, respectively.
So until the New Year, I’ll be working to get the new layout prepped and ready for launch. Any feedbacks, regarding the screenshot that I have up right now are welcomed. I need to start making my websites so that you guys like it. I’ll like the site no matter what but the reason why it’s up and running is because of the visitors. Without you guys, I don’t think I’d be typing out an blog every day. As long as you keep coming back, I’ll try keep updating.