The next update

Phew!

This one was a lot of hard work.

Completely redesigned the layout. Added some mucho neato graphics (and mucho needed I might add) and completely redid the color scheme (thanks Apurva, you’re the best!).

Hacked my brains out over the CSS.

Coded in a lot of changes for better UI in the codebehind, I don’t remember most of them. The ones I do remember (because they are immediately apparent) are:

• Relaid out the date links so that they appear next to each post title, along with the time
• Comment links show the number of comments that are present ina post only when there are comments; else a Post a comment link is shown
• The date beside the post title is actually a link to the page which shows the posts of the day. Added a nice tooltip to this.

Learnt a lot of Photoshop. Even though I say so myself, I can fairly get by in Photoshop now. At least enough to create a fairly good looking website. This was really a good experience. I learnt how much hard work the web designers actually have to do, every time the front-end coders and design implementorstell them to go change an image because it sucks, or just size it differently because of a miscalculation of content or layout.

I learnt some more CSS. As usual.

One of the key things I learnt from this experience was something I was missing for a long time in my repertoire. Colors! I could never get how one figured out that this color would go well with this design, or that this color on this link would provide a nice contrast. The reason for this, I think is that I was not using the correct tools! I would take hours (well, actually I would give up before that) to figure out a color to be used; when I can now figure out a color in seconds thanks to Photoshop’s amazingly usable color picker. The color picker is extremely intuitive and IMHO unparallelled in picking out a relative color based on an existing one.

And as is usual with most hard, laborious work I’ve done in my life, I am happy with the outcome. If you’ve got any suggestions for the site or any questions about how I did a particular thing, do please post a comment, that way I can answer it for all visitors in one go.

Oh, if you wanna see the actual photograph where the top banner came from, you should head over to my gallery and get the full picture.

Posted while listening to Bruce Springsteen – Human Touch