A New Design for DarrenBarefoot.com
November 11th, 2008, 17 Comments »
We’ve finally gotten around to launching the newest version of this website. It’s about nine years old, and I think this is version 4.0. There are still plenty of bugs to squash (and the Jobs section is going to be ‘coming soon’ for a while), but all the basics are in. I also need to think about what the best stuff to include in the sidebars of the site is. I welcome any suggestions on that front.
I didn’t have a lot of grand plans for the redesign. Mostly I just was tired of the old design, and thought it was high time for a new one. Plus, I wanted to broaden the main column space a bit, make the site widget-ready, implement threaded comments, get all the static pages into WordPress and tweak sundry other bits and pieces.
One Mashed-Up Header
I am particularly pleased about the way the header graphic came together. Regular readers may recall that, back in March, I ran a competition on Pixish (now defunct, sadly) to get a new header graphic designed. It looked like this:
That was designed by a guy named Sam, who lived in Brighton. It combined a photo that Roland took of a film lot directional sign (that really said ‘DB’–no Photoshopping required) with a photo of me that Phillip took at BarCamp.
I handed the header graphic to Tzaddi, who tweaked it and built out the rest of the site’s aesthetic. In early previews of the site, people weren’t keen on that photo, so we replaced it with one that Scott Beale took at Gnomedex.
The header is the happy result of an ad hoc collaboration between five people and powered by Creative Commons. Plus sixty4media did the installation and upgrading of WordPress, so I suppose that’s seven people.
Feedback Welcome
I welcome any and all feedback. I’m pretty happy with the aesthetics at this stage, but I’m open to suggestions. If you spot anything that’s funky aside from the obvious, feel free to leave a comment. And do let me know if you have an opinion on what belongs in a site’s sidebars.