For quite some time now I have been playing with the thought of redesigning. There was nothing wrong with the old design - since it was very close to being a carbon copy of the site of a real web designer - but it’s healthy to give a web site a new look every now and then.

After reading Jason Beaird’s book “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” I had all kinds of exciting ideas for the design: Badges, round corners, gradients and all the other goodies that make up a genuine web 2.0 design.

But let’s face it. I’m not a web designer - and I don’t have PhotoShop, which is the de facto standard when it comes to graphics software for web designers. There is always the GIMP, but no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, it’s a major pain in the ass unless I spend a month to get used to the interface. On top of this, I think I’m esthetically color blind. I’m able to see all colors, I’m just not able to combine and match them in an esthetically pleasing manner. So I’m sticking to black, white and a third color for the links.

Here is the new design, a result of about six hours of work on Friday evening and night. I’ve made some notable changes, for instance changed both the font face and the size of the font, stripped the sidebar of most of its content, moved the one-liners from the bottom of the page to the header, created a moblog bar and generally simplified everything. Perhaps the most notable change is the “read more” link on all the entries on the front page. It’s there to keep the front page from growing too large, but I’m not really sure if I’ll keep it.

Anyway, I enjoyed creating the new design and I hope you enjoy using it.