8 Ways to Sunday

For the past week or so, I’ve been noodling around on a redesign of 8 Ways to Sunday as a way to get my bearings in Macromedia Studio MX 2004. I’ve only done about 15% of the work, if that, but I’m getting an increasingly solid idea of what I’d like to accomplish:

• Use WordPress 1.3 template system to provide a richer, more varied user experience (see “Anatomy of a WordPress Theme,” by Ryan Boren). In particular, I’d like to bring the search feature more into line with Jeff Veen’s recommendations. I could do this without WordPress 1.3, but I’d rather wait and use the new features than hack something together now.
• A design that is both more usable and more fun. Move major navigation (Home / About / Archives/ Photoblog/ etc.) to the top of the page, under the masthead; keep category and other info in the familiar right-hand sidebar that many users expect when visiting a weblog. Maintain high contrast for readability, but play with variations other than black-on-white.
• Faster-loading, shorter home page. I’m thinking I may show the complete post for the most recent two, excerpts for the next three, and titles only for another four or five. Still playing with ideas for less linear page layout, but I’m not sure I like any of them yet.
• New color scheme. I’ve had some variation on blue & grey since this thing started almost a year and a half ago, and I’m getting sick of looking at it. I’m considering green and black, or an earthy yellow-ochre-black pallette.
• Gravatar support in comments.

These are the things I’m still going back and forth on:

• Fixed width vs. flexible layout (or some combination thereof).
• Use of sIFR for headings.
• Whether to pay attention to all this noise, or just go with my gut. My gut says, “Simple is good. Simple can be beautiful.”

Before I finish a redesign of this weblog, I need to finish an existing project — getting the FrontPage cruft out of Little Elegy, transitioning it to a tableless layout based on custom Dreamweaver templates, and moving it to a new hosting provider. Once that’s done, I’ll come back to this and see if my ideas have solidified any further.

When it’s ready for preview I’ll give the new look a trial run on my test site, which is already running WP 1.3.