Site redesign

06 May 2012

If you fall into the intersection of people who have looked at this website before yesterday and people who are looking at it after today, you may notice that I’ve given it a bit of a spitshine.

It’s still on WordPress, but in place of the venerable DePo Skinny theme, it’s now using a custom theme that I built on top of the Thematic framework. The most notable differences are that I’ve pushed all of the margins outward, made all the text bigger, and pulled the information from the bottom up to a new sidebar. My 1-column days are over.

Also, I’ve used my favorite color as the hover for all of the links.

I had made and modified WordPress themes before, but I was surprised to discover how long it has been. I’d never, for example, used a “Child Theme,” which appear to have been state-of-the-art since, like, 2009. There’s a bit of a conceptual learning curve, but using one you can develop a whole theme basically only using CSS with only touches of basically copy-and-paste PHP. In addition to the WordPress Codex entry, I found the ThemeShaper tutorial really helpful.

One note about responsive design: I don’t have it. I was conflicted about that, and the next redesign may support it, but I wanted to get something finished and it seems like smartphones do pretty well with reflowing the content.

I’ll probably work out some of the kinks over the next couple of days, but if you find something that seems unusual, please let me know.