I’ve completed all of the redesign now, with the new blog page finally done. It’s pretty awesome, especially considering how it was before. You’re looking at the new design, but compare it to the old here. It doesn’t go without saying… but Internet Explorer sucks. For the best results, view my site in Firefox or Safari.

Funnily enough I also happened across this, a blog directory page for my site. It has the snapshot of the really old PIM site design, the one I had in ‘06 and ‘07. It’s interesting to see the changes over the years. This makes about the third design in four years.

At any rate, the best thing about the new blog design is improved navigation. For some odd reason I thought it was a good idea to have only one blog post viewable at a time, with no pagination and only category links to browse. This means there was no way in hell you’d ever see anything archived, unless you stumbled over it via a search engine. The good news is that you can now see 5 posts per page (except of course, for the individual post page/permalink), can browse previous/next 5 posts, can click on the archives per month, AND still browse by category if you wish. Yay! Now even I know what I’ve posted and when

Additionally, I’ve gone back and deprecated a whole stack of posts: largely to do with selling things I haven’t been selling for over a year now. Some which do discuss those things (or things that have since been moved to SOP) I have left in place, as they also discuss other things, like milestone site statistics or festival stuff.

There are other improvements, such as a quick links list on the right sidebar. I’ve made a ’shadow puppets made easy’ blog post, which lists all my shadow puppet tutorials in one place - on this site at any rate  - so people can see just how good they are. Maybe someone will be enticed to buy a puppet that way. There are also links recommending you to the festival diary categories, and a link to SOP.

My favourite improvement though, is the footer at the bottom of every page. I’ve made use of a great new feature of browsers: they allow you to change the opacity of a background or image. The footer has a dark background, but not completely opaque, so you can still see through to the background of the actual site. In the footer you can also find my latest tweets, a pic from my Flickr files, a ‘like’ button for Facebook (not a ‘be a friend’ thing, just a like for this domain name. Although you can still be my friend if you want ), and a link to Youtube.

Another interesting thing is that the rolling background (which you’ll find it hard to notice, but it does actually blend into itself over and over) creates different effects depending on the length of the page. On one page you may notice the next/prev post links appear lighter than they do on another page. The background of these links is the same colour: it’s simply a perception issue, since the background image of the site itself is different colours at different heights. The knock-on effect is that the blog page will look slightly different every time, making it less static over time.

Amazingly enough, I’m also enjoying the three-column design. I’m normally a hater of three column websites, most of which seem to be so full of stuff that you can barely find anything. But keeping everything big and giving each item a big bit of white space (margin) means that it’s not too overwhelming. Another thing I like is my error page. Try visiting: http://www.puppetsinmelbourne.com.au/gallery.php/&disp=arcdir. (For some reason IE doesn’t bring up my custom error page. So try a different browser to see it) I had a little fun rewording the error message .

There is still a lot to do, as I want to go back and do some minor re-editing of posts so they fit in with the new design. Since there are lots of posts (some 400 or so pages worth) it will take some time and will likely be a ‘one a day’ task along with the migration of content still ongoing for SOP.

The good news is that I will now be able to refocus my attention on other things: largely the creation of new content, and the work on new puppet builds. Thanks to everyone for your patience over the past year, as I know there’s been a lot of chaos and everything’s been a bit all over the place. As many web people say: a website is never done. I think Puppets in Melbourne has been the dictionary-image of that!