Design
Last year I decided I would create a WordPress theme as a little personal project to do. This lasted for all of a couple of weeks. My main problem I was trying to create a theme that would be flexible enough for a wide range of users. Thinking this way just drove me nuts and I wasn’t able to create a design that I thought could suit this goal. So the project started to drift.
One of the issues many web designers face is that of the limited number of web safe fonts that can be used to display standard text. Now Cufón has entered the game are we a step closer to a new world of web typography.
Previously the only method of using a wide range of fonts on the web was to use image replacement. This however can be time consuming, difficult to maintain and bad for SEO, especially if used for all the text in a website. Over a year ago I came across Sifr as a more workable solution but found it to have a number of downsides mainly to do with its dependence on Flash and its inexplicable ability to resize text depending on the size of containing elements. All this frustrated me, limiting the situations I felt comfortable in using it.
In the web community there are many people that have a very elitist view and see the actions of some as second-rate or blatant whoring for traffic. One such example of this is the reaction Paul Boag (of the Boagworld podcast) received recently when starting to post articles in a ‘top ten’ format.
Although I myself am not perfect when it comes to viewing the actions of others I feel Paul has no need to justify himself as these articles make online content more accessible by breaking the content down into manageable chunks under descriptive headings.
So with this in mind I thought I’d post my own top ten, but to take it into the realm of the ridiculous I thought my top ten would be of other top ten lists essentially listing 100 web related tips and tricks.
In the last few weeks I’ve been getting that itch that a lot of website designers get to redesign my own website. It was back in May 2008 that I last redesigned my website, creating something I was finally pleased with as pretty much all previous versions of the website had problems in design, content and construction.
Unlike every previous time I’ve wanted to redesign I’m actually still pretty happy with what I have; it works in the most part and still looks good. For this reason I don’t want to throw everything out and completely redesign the site but I do want to make some changes and streamline some of the site. Some might say I want to realign the site, although what I have in mind may sit somewhere between the two.