Well here it is. My new website design, entitled Clean and Mean. This is what I have been slaving over for the past week. It’s not perfect, but it’s my design and that’s what matters most.
The whole idea around this theme was to having something that looks sleek, and provides an easy way to find new content. You’ll see on all of the post pages I now link to relative content in the sidebar. This will help you find old posts that you may have missed, etc. You’ll also notice I have now opted for a fixed width design. I was getting tired of never knowing how to size images, so the fixed width will insure that the post will look the same on any resolution.
To keep the website looking fresh, I will be changing the header image monthly. Each month I will make a post about why I chose that header, and then archive the last month’s header image for later reference. I will eventually be changing the color scheme with the header image here and there, to keep the site look consistent.
Now for the known bugs. In Opera, the navigation menu bar is really screwed up. It’s still usable, but doesn’t look like it should at all. If anyone knows of any Opera specific CSS hacks, I can fix the menu bar, but until I can figure something out you’ll just have to live with it. I know only 1% of my readers Use Opera, but sometimes the minority can make the most noise. 
All I can say is Internet Explorer users got very lucky. I only needed five minor fixes, so I decided to fix the glitches. If there would have been a lot of glitches, I wouldn’t have. You should still be ashamed of yourself for using a non-standard compliant browser. In this day and age, there is no reason for it.
That’s all I have to say. If you have any suggestions for improvement or found any bugs be sure to let me know. I’d would also really appreciate any feedback on what you think of the design.
Now that I have a good design, it’s time to focus on what’s important – good content. Look for some creative, unique posts in the future; and less of the posts about real life.
23 Comments
I really enjoy the new design. The old one seemed childish to me. Keep up the good work.
One minor complaint when browsing your link bar at the top, the page for Script/Plugins is not aligned to the center like the rest of the pages.
Looks really well done Ron. Has a very professional look. Good job!
I like it! I hope I can find the right theme for my site.
AWESOME DESIGN RON! Spectacular!
Wayland, do you have a screenshot of what you mean? I don’t see it.
Thats weird, why didn’t my gravatar show up? Also, where it says name, email website, it doesnt show up correctly. i took a screen shot of mine if you want to see it, but i don’t see what wayland is talking about.
one more thing, it took awhile for this to post…it hung then the firefox download manage came up asking to save the php file. weird.
Well, I do not notice it at work where I use IE. But at home using Firefox the page was centered in the middle and when you click the various links and the page loads for scripts/plugins, the thing shifts a little to the left. When I arrive home I will see if I can reproduce it.
@Jonathan
I have no clue what’s up with the Gravatars. If you look at the source code of the page, your gravatar image is inserted correctly in the page. If you view the url of the image, that loads fine, but the image is not scaled to 30px. I think it may have to do something with the scaling of images, since Gravatars aren’t working for other people also. I’ll monitor the situation.
I was just fixing the Name, Email, and URL boxes so they didn’t reply on JavaScript, which is probably why things didn’t look right for you. It should be corrected now. Also, the hanging on my website is something that started to happen yesterday even before I switched themes. If it continues I’ll have a talk with my host.
@Wayland
That would be great.
Nevermind, Ron. I figured out what was causing it. Apparently the script page is the only one that does not have a scroll bar on the side. So when clicking to the other pages that have them it pushes the rest of the page over to make room for the scroll bar. So you can disregard my email.
I like how you put name,email, websute URL into the textbox. but since wordpress prefers URI, maybe you should use it too? but its coming along quite well, a very mature theme. i look forward in seeing your new headers…
I’ve never agreed with the term URI, but I see WordPress does use it everywhere, so I should change it. Thanks for pointing that out.
Wayland can you do me a favor on the next comment you post. Backspace out the “URL” in the textbox. There was a glitch in my code where it remembers the text “URL” in the textbox if you post a comment. Backspacing it out and posting another comment will fix it.
Jonathan, regarding the Gravatar issue, I was reading their forums and other people are having the same problem as me. I guess I just have to wait it out until they get their problem fixed.
you are right, my own gravatars aren’t even loading up…hmm.
id unno how i feel on the URI/URL issue. I see the point on URI but im used to URL. I dont mind each, i use them both.
I also noted in the gravatar your still censoring R rated gravatars. Now I understand some people out there can have pretty sick stuff, but I really don’t believe censorship. I am anti FCC, anti-bleeps, anti-mosaics, etc., etc., etc. I find it appalling that the FCC is going through a war on communications because some ugly girls tit was exposed to TV. I mean, in most of the world, Canada, Europe, Asia, they don’t censor anywhere near as much as we do. And we are supposed to be the freest country in the world!
And besides, I thought you were liberal….at least Anti-Bush, and Bush is pro censorship!
I understand its a family orineted website, but a 30×30 px image of whatever won’t hurt anybody.
I think you have it a little wrong. The way the Gravatar rating system works is it will display Gravatars up to and including an R rating. There is only one level above R which is X. According to their site a rating of X means:
A rating of R still will contain nudity, etc. and for a 30×30 pixel image I don’t care about that stuff. It’s just the really hardcore stuff that I don’t want on the site. You can read more on Gravatar’s rating system on their site.
Oh like the really gross disgusting stuff? Hmm weird, how your icon still shows up here and not on my site…it must be my cache though.
I just installed Opera to test my own website and your site looks fine. Did you fix it? Or am i missing something alltogether?
regards
The only thing that was screwed up in Opera was the menu bar. The rest of the site looked fine. What version of Opera are you running, because I heard the beta software passed the Acid tests, so maybe the new version will look better.
version 8.51 build 7712. i dont think its the beta. the menu bar looks good to me, looks about the same as it does in FF
Jonathan, would you mind posting a screenshot? I’m just curious how it looks. I have no clue why my Opera is rending the menu bar so weird.
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[...] In case you’ve forgotten, each month I’m changing the header to something which has some meaning to me. This month’s header has a multiple meanings. As you can see this is an image of my OS X desktop. This past Christmas I received parts to build myself an x86 Mac, and I’m loving it. The features of OS X are amazing, from the cool visual effects to the powerful Unix core; everything about OS X in neat and exciting. [...]
[...] Now that I have WordPress 2.0 installed, I plan to make some minor changes to Clean and Mean. The changes will be minor, mostly dealing with the color scheme. I just think the new header kind of conflicts with the color scheme of the site, and I would like to get a better color scheme down before I start crawling out my skin. The updates should take place sometime during the week, so you have that to look forward to. function openSpellChecker() { // get the textarea we’re going to check var txt = document.getElementById(‘comment’); // give the spellChecker object a reference to our textarea // pass any number of text objects as arguments to the constructor: var speller = new spellChecker( txt,”http://cavemonkey50.com” ); // kick it off speller.openChecker(); } [...]