Out with the old, in with the new

I don’t really go back and look at a blog in a browser once I’ve found one I’m interested in.  RSS feeds, Wii versions, compact mobile versions and Twitter have all drive me to the information without having to monitor streams and streams of bookmarks all day long.  Soon enough Google Wave will crash its way in and make it even less likely anyone will ever even see your site.  I can often find it difficult to motivate myself into redesigning those first impressions, here.

But the Xbox got RRoD.  So I haven’t got anything better to do.

Design

This new layout is quite a lot cleaner than the old one – especially the minimalist header which for the first time has no sign of the beloved post-it note.

The sidebars used to take up most of the screen space on my 7″ eee pc, so they’re now completely collapsible giving more screen space to the posts.  A feature which wasn’t possible with the old layout because of the really poor way I laid it all out.

Functionality

I also wanted to use the redesign to play around with some jQuery, so the underlying code is cleaner and more modular than it was before.  Being able to move the sidebar boxes probably isn’t particularly useful yet, especially as I’m not saving the preferences – but it’s a nice demo, anyway.

Facebook status is gone.  Twitter status is in.

The navigation is a lot clearer and to the point, including adding my recent job-hunting-related portfolio page to the list, as a welcome reminder to myself that I must endeavour to update it regularly.

Speed

Last but not least, the content now loads before the sidebars.  It’s an obvious mistake to fix really – but I’m pleased it finally is 🙂  I’ll be optimising more with the help of Google Page Speed, but I’m too lazy to do it today 🙂

Your thoughts?

Leave me a comment to let me know what you think.  Good, bad, or just plain ugly?