It’s been less than 10 months since my last redesign and it’s an alternating pattern now with a girl design and a floral design.

Got it done more quickly this time with a little more decisiveness and not being overly ambitious. I’ve been coding and trying new things over the past few months plus I’m familiar enough with HTML/CSS that I don’t go scratching my head on how to get a certain thing to display properly. Heh, this time around I’ve also stopped testing for Internet Explorer 6 and Opera. Tried this design on Firefox and Safari (which displays the date a little weird) and it generally looks fine.

For the design, I’m generally okay with it. I’ve always wanted this grunge look so it started from the background with brush streaks looking like rock. Then I added the left pink flower and worked from there. Added a little more foliage (all from a day shoot at Central Park) and did a centre column and that was pretty much it.

This site runs on only 3 picture files, and since it is already 2008 and everyone I know who reads this site uses broadband, I was just lazy and made one gigantic background to cover all the design elements. No need to splice images in Photoshop, even the rollover navigation bar is one entire image.

True to my style (and I don’t find it ideal here) is the need for bright colours splashed around. The text headers are all drenched in some summer pastel colour and it doesn’t quite fit with the overall design. The red was put in just out of poor stubbornness to abandon the colour, and orange is the trademark styling for the M logo.

Threw out the search bar as I wasn’t quite inclined to fix it at the moment. Yes, I finally fixed the missing ‘home’ button. Wanted to add some AJAX styling for showing recent posts and add back some links to other sites. Didn’t quite figure out how to get the Javascript to work, so I left it out. Very much into minimalistic design these days. Fixed up some of the comments styling and other little things that I did not bother about in the previous design.

Updated to WordPress 2.5.1. I like the new administration interface and they’ve cleaned it up quite a bit. It’s bloated up since I first started using it but WordPress is still by far the most intuitive of the bunch of blogging platforms I’ve tried for posting as well as for customising. The most recent I’ve tested is Chyrp which works like a twitter/tumblr style blog. It’s super lightweight and definitely something to try out if you want to run your own blog and don’t require too many bells and whistles. I couldn’t quite figure out how the styling worked so didn’t dwell into it further. Plus it’s also relatively new and the author is still changing how everything works under the hood.

Just needed to get this redesign out of my system so I can start putting my energy into my other hobbies. Wanted to keep this design as a work in progress, to add the above mentioned stuff, but will see how it goes. Heh.

Another one for the archives.