Warning: web design-related quasi-wankery ahead.
I’ve been thinking about redesigning smerpology.org — specifically my blog — for quite some time now. However, like many things, I have not taken the time to make it happen. While I know (X)HTML and CSS pretty darn well, I’m not a design guru. The last time I tried to pull off a redesign, I got halfway done with it and stopped. The result is what you are looking at, provided you are actually visiting my site and not just reading the feed.
In some ways, I like the current design. Specifically, I like the “titles-on-the-left-side-aligned-with-the-text-in-the-center”. I was trying to emulate a page in a book with the side notes for section headings. I came up with this on my own, and felt pretty good about it. It took me a while to get it to look right on all browsers, but I did it.
But, due to laziness, I never got around to doing any more than the look and feel itself. I failed to complete the implementation of the site’s navigation. There was (and still is) no about page, no links to categories, no search. Not even a stinking “previous posts” link. And I’m not at all happy with the form used to enter comments, nor am I happy with the comments section’s look and feel. And while I like my site’s heading graphic, I’m not happy about the way it just floats in space.
So, there I was musing that I should just start over when I encountered this post over at Daring Fireball. This freaked me out a bit, as reading it gave me more than a little sense of déja vù. Yes, I could relate to Joe Trotter’s feelings about Wordpress — or, more specifically, the ubiquitous Wordpress default themes1. Yes, I agreed with Gruber that the only real way to stand out in the online world was to do the damn design yourself.
But, more importantly, a good blog design isn’t anything without good content2. I don’t read Gruber’s (or anyone else’s) blog simply because they are well-designed. I read them because the content has a high signal-to-noise ratio. The fact that some of them happen to be well-designed is a bonus.
At any rate, it’s time for me to reconsider starting over.
1 One more blue box above white text and I’m going to hurl. That theme is like the blogging equivalent of Comic Sans.
2 c.f. “Personality goes a long way” argument in Pulp Fiction.