Redesigned My Blog

Well, take a look around. I finally bit the bullet and redesigned my blog. I've tried to keep a clean design, and so navigation is kept to a minimum.

The Header

The site leads with a large graphic of an army of robots disappearing into the distance. Why? Well, my identity on a lot of social media sites is GerryBot, so I thought a visual reference to that would be appropriate. I hope it's eyecatching and unique enough to make the site stand out from the pack.

Sidebar Choices

OK, on this site I share words and pictures. But that's only part of my online identity, and I wanted to share other parts of my online presence here.

At the top of the sidebar, I showcase a random photo from my gallery (which will hopefully grow with time), and a list of recent posts on the site.

Underneath this, I've pulled in the most recent content I've submitted to StumbleUpon, one of my favourite social news/bookmarking sites. One slight problem is that StumbleUpon tends to choke on punctuation and renders some titles difficult to read. I may have to switch to del.icio.us or Ma.gnol.ia to get better control over titles.

Beneath this, I'm streaming my latest updates on Twitter. I mentioned in a post a while back that I liked the idea of brevity. Well, the 140 character limit is probably the ultimate inducement to keep things short. So, I'm having fun with that at the moment, and hopefully it gives people another opportunity to connect with me.

Content

I've chosen to put the content in the white main column in contrast with the sidebar, which is in the same background colour as the page. I like the idea of visual separation.

I've also set it up so that the photos in the gallery are displayed in the best way they can be. The maximum width for the display is 520px, which is reasonably large, and the 40px white margin around the content acts as quite a nice frame (if I say so myself).

In the content area, I've also opted for a slightly larger font than I'd normally be comfortable with. I think it's better for legibility and visually, I quite like it.

Footer

The only area I *may* have skimped on is the footer. Maybe I'll pop something a bit more graphical in there later. More robots, obviously...

So, that's it for the redesign. I had a couple of people check it out in different browsers, and they've given it a big thumbs up. Which is nice, because I was worried that I was getting rusty on the CSS and design side of things.

Anyway, all that remains is for me to invite comments on the design from anyone else out there on the Interweb...