Re-design
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 17:57 If you’ve been to this website before, you will have noticed that there has been a major redesign of the website today.
My aim has been to reduce the clutter on the pages and to make it easier to read the text without distractions. This is important as this is very much a text-based website. As part of this re-design I’ve removed the left-hand margin and combined the contents with the right-hand margin. In the process I’ve got rid of some of the margin items.
At the same time I have made the blog the Home page since it is the main vehicle for new writing. I’ve renamed the old static Home page as “About”, and I intend to do a major re-write of that page in the near future.
I also intend to make “Books” a main menu item.
Be prepared for more changes after I’ve lived with the new design for a while.
Reader Comments (9)
A very nice update! Now, waiting for your new book. Thanks for keeping your site and interests alive. Retirement? Who retires? It could be such a bore.
John Brooks
Nice the new web site except the grey for me....
What tool have you used ?
Except the grey I find the design nice and clear.
Thanks for us.
definitely an improvement!
1. Serif. There's a reason that dead-tree books and newspapers use fonts such as Times-Roman rather than those such as Helvetica for most of the text you want to read – serif fonts are much easier on the eyes, and allow for faster reading. As long as one has a reasonably high-resolution screen, there is no excuse for using sans-serif fonts for anything other than headings, titles, etc. Serif fonts should be used for most text. The original font used for comments on the earlier design of this website made it a joy to read on-screen.
2. Contrast. Gray on light-gray (Blog comments) and dark-gray on black (menu bar) look stylish at first, but make the site much more difficult to use and read on a variety of screens in a variety of lighting conditions. Higher-contrast text is better; it doesn't need to be as garish as black (0,0,0) on white (255,255,255); but again, the previous design was more readable due to its having higher contrast.
My two cents,
Fonts: I don't honestly think that for shortish passages of text it makes much difference. Sans serif text irritates me in a printed book, but on screen I think on the whole I prefer it.
Contrast: Comments tend to be very short (ok, not all of them!) and again I just don't think it matters much. On the whole I don't like too much contrast on screen. I think printed text and screen text are two different things and have different rules.