Reboot 99.9% finished

It’s almost there! I say 99.9% because a) I’m still getting errors when I try to validate the page and b) I’m sure that there will always be something that needs to be changed, tweaked or improved upon. The design of the site changed a few times over the past days, but I think I’ll settle for the current design…at least until the reboot is over. When I look back at the previous designs, renet@web has come a long way.When I first started this blog, in January 2005, I sported the following design. I used the Relaxation theme from John Wrana as a base and then customised the css to my liking. That was a two column theme that was very ‘clean’. Customising this theme was great learning curve and an eye opener - I was used to using tables in my html code, and all of a sudden, there I was having to use css to do the same thing…across several browsers. I spent many days pulling my hair trying to get it together. Once I was comfortable with that, I then managed to integrate my own picture gallery into the theme. You can see a larger picture of the theme here.

The next design came out at the end of 2005. This site design was inspired by the very snazzy binarybonsai website. Again I used the relaxation theme as a base. I dropped the sidebar, changed the code to display the post content and no longer the excerpt, added some plugins to display the latest posts and comments, implemented the asides technique for displaying posts and added the ajax commenting method. A little later down the track I experimented with the script.aculo.us javascript libraries and added a sliding navigation bar (drawer like). You can see a larger picture of the theme here.

Recently I stumbled across the css reboot site and read that a reboot would be happening on May 1st. At first I thought I would not have enough time to get something decent of the ground - but what the hell I thought, if it is not ready for this reboot it’ll be for the next one. Because I like the one column theme, my first approach was to try and keep it. I also thought of having a grey background that would contrast nicely with colourfull post pictures. You can see a larger picture of the theme here.
Something wasn’t right - I wasn’t really pleased with that design. So I went back to the drawing board and that is how the present look came to be. You can see a larger picture of the theme here.
Once I felt sorta happy with the design, I asked for some feedback on the wordpress forums and so far the response has been pretty positive. I’ve still got a few days to iron out the last glitches…

Posted in Wordpress | Published on April 21st, 2006