New ThinkinPHP Design
Posted on 23/8/06 by Felix Geisendörfer
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Sorry that this is yet another post about the future of this site, I promise the next one will be back on php/testing/or whatever I'm usally writing about. But meanwhile I feel like posting a preview of the new design that will be used for the relaunch of this site. I'm not quite done with it yet and I would love any ideas/suggestions you might have about it since you are going to be the ones who have to live with it in the near future and things are still easy to change on the drawing board.
You may also notice the "Support ThinkingPHP.org" section on top of the right navigation and yes, it means that I'll monetize this blog to some degree. I already have some ads on this site. but the way they are placed generates an extremly poor click through rate. The new ad layout will be a little more agressive and I appoligize for it, but I promise to keep it at a reasonable level. In turn you'll recieve more blog entries, articles and code releases then ever before.
So I hope you enjoy the new design - any feedback is appriciated. Keep in mind that I'm not really a designer, this is probably close to the best I can do ; ). Oh and if you noticed that there is no tags/categories section in the new right navigation - don't worry, I just forgot to put them up, they'll be there.
--Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined
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I like it.
However, I think you should not forget the alignment in order to have a CRAP design - http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/how-crap-is-your-site-design.
Seems to me that the titles are not aligned with the articles content.
Walker Hamilton: I could have pasted in one of my previous articles instead of lorem ipsum, agreed. However, the code displaying stuff is something I'll work out in Html/Css since it's way more convenient to do it there instead of an image editor. Regarding long posts: That's why I split up Blog and Articles. Blog posts will be short little tips & tricks, teasers to articles, updates on a story and things like that, but the really long in-depth stuff will be moved to the articles section. But yes, I'll have to decide how that'll work, but most likely in html/css again.
Lucian Lature: I'm glad you like it ; ). Yes post contents are indented a little bit compared to the headlines. I actually like that as yet another form of expressing the hierarchy in a document. Do you think it would be better to align them?
Felix, this is a step forward. I like the color scheme and layout. Maybe a few things I would change about the design, but its not MY site ;) No matter what - I will continue to read your blog.
Can I make some suggestions? Well, I will anyway :P
1.- Please, no serif for the copy. It's harder to read. It looks Ok in the titles.
2.- Reduce contrast on copy text. #333 over #fff works better for the eyes.
3.- You need more whitespace. Really. duplicate, at least, margin and padding for everything and everything will look better.
4.- That empty space in the header looks weird, like if the Logo has been rendered out of place. The logo looks cool out of the box, but maybe you should make the box less tall.
Besides that, I like the striped theme and the colors are pleasant. Anyway, I will keep reading.
Hey sosa, nice to see you sticking around ; ).
I think I can agree with everything you said, thanks for your comment. Do you think I need more padding for the right navigation? A lot of items would take up 2 lines if I did that, maybe I should make it wider? What do you think?
I agree with sosa, need more whitespace around the post content especially.
something about the text being so close to the link bar makes me feel anxious inside, and not in a good way ;)
[...] Most of you probably have seen the first preview version I talked about a while ago. In the past days I’ve tried to fix some of the issues people pointed out with it and started to create a HTML/AHAH prototype of the site. [...]
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It's alright. You should use actual content when designing though.
For instance. Code display is an important part of your site. I don't see an article in that design that shows how you would display code.
Also, your articles on technical items tend to be fairly long compared to the Lorem Ipsum you have substituted in. And yet you have not shown how that would work within the page (it might be too long if you have many articles on the front page. You might also think about designing it so that you have an excerpt->read more link. But this is not currently handled in the design either.