Okay, been using my designing brain for the past few hours and I’m having trouble switching to the part of the brain that can actually write. So here we are, after two years, I finally manage to plonk down a new design. Heh.

First thing I noted, I managed to do both without my 24″ monitor (which I sorely missed while doing this). The prior site was designed with two 17″ monitors. This one I had to squint on my 12″ laptop screen to ensure that everything looked right. Kind of painful to drag things around and have no where to put it.

Okay, so on about the site. There is no version 4, as I have taken so long to do this design, I’ve probably gone through dozens of designs that have ultimately ended up being trashed. So 5 is a nice round number to work with. The name Summer Blossom Edition? It has flowers, it’s summer in the States now, and just an excuse to find a name. Heh.

This time round, I return to my roots on how my designs always had a girl’s face and a flower hairpin of sorts. Now I’ve got a full sized girl and not just a pretty face anymore. The whole website just started from the girl’s face and upper body. Made that into a full dress with shoes. The girl is unique with everything being Chinese/Asian except for the eyes. Heh, I just liked them blue.

Everything else was just tacked on from there, so I had some trouble trying to get it to look nice. The flowers are part of a Japanese Foliage brushset that I used in Photoshop and are the only bits I didn’t design. Similar to my first few designs where I dug out recurring patterns on the web for my backgrounds.

Stuck with orange but reintroduced red into the design. Threw out the side blog and links as I don’t use them very much. Might add stuff back later when I do some amendments to the site over time. Finally got proper navigation buttons as well. Heh, I’ve always only just added them on as text links, so now they get the full rollover effect. Threw away my Portfolio and Family links. The former is cause I don’t really see myself as much of a designer, and the second was cause the database got lost in transition from one of my host’s internal servers to one that supported a newer version of MySQL for versions of WordPress after 2.1. Supports larger photos (500px wide) and I just realised that I did not make a Home button (super oversight, doh!).

Upgraded to the latest branch of WordPress as of writing (version 2.2.1). The previous one was at 1.5.2 and other than the autosave (while you type) and the better spam protection features, I don’t really need much else on it. Heh, that’s what working life does to you, you spend less time experimenting with stuff and I do believe, had I started doing this only now, I would have no idea on how to even begin to design or setup my own website.

Browser wise, it works fine on the latest Opera and Firefox versions. Have only Internet Explorer 7 which does most of it okay, but you’ll notice a colour shift somewhere in the seams (what kind of crappy PNG support did they put into IE?).

For archiving purposes, here is the old design.