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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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23 July 2001 - 9:26 pm
Well, Dreamweaver won't connect to the Internet to retrieve the index page so that I can use it to type this post. I don't know why, but I suspect it is because of the changes I made to my Dial-Up Networking settings last week. I don't know why this turn of events surprises me, because it is the perfect cap to my day. Let me elaborate.
After arriving at work today, I attempted to do what I do every morning, namely read the twenty-six blogs I have linked from my home page. None of them would load. In fact the only external Internet site I could load was hotmail. I normally spend about an hour catching up on my favorite websites, and I tried to do so today, but I couldn't drag checking my email out for an hour. Imagine, if you will, me pressing the POP Mail link in hotmial once (on average, I was timing it) every 40 seconds. Imagine me doing this about 45 times. Eventually, I got bored, and tried to find other things to do, but I was pretty bored until the Internet connection came back around 10am.
In technical news, -273 will be deploying greymatter on August 1, assuming we get a few technical issues worked out by then. A minor redesign may accompany the switch, but it won't be anything major. At the very least, I'm going to clean up the html a bit. If I'm lucky I may even get it to validate, but somehow I don't think I'll have the patience for that.
Speaking of redesigns, hornygoat.org redesigned yesterday. I'm afraid I don't care for the new look all that much. The colors are okay, but I don't like the font. And the blinking cursor thing at the top of the page bothers me A LOT, to the point of distraction even.
You may have noticed that in my recent posts I've been posing questions to you, our readers. This is an attempt to start a dialog with our readers. This means that my questions aren't rhetorical, and I'm hoping for a response. (If I weren't embarassed by the paucity of readers here at -273, I would be tempted to start a discussion board. But because we don't yet have a large following, I will instead direct you to Planet Shhh, a discussion board I've been reading and posting to recently.) Anyway, today's question will be in two parts: 1) What is your opinion on site redesigns? For example, should redesigns be evolutionary, revolutionary, or non-existant? 2) From a useability and appearance standpoint, does -273 need a redesign?
I'll take a moment to give you my opinions on this issue, and then you can voice your opinion to me via email or instant messenger (my screen name is HiddenInput). As a general rule, I think site redesigns, especailly for commercial sites, should almost always be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Changing a few things at a time, from my perspective, is much preferable to changing a huge number of things all at once. Of course, for weblogs not much is lost in a total redesign, because the content is still easy enough to find, but commercial sites should thin klong and hard about the benefits their customers will reap from a redesign. If there aren't many (and your design is relatively up-to-date) you should probably hold off. I think this general theory applies to the current versio of -273 as well. We need to clean up our code. It will lead to faster downloads (a huge reduction in filesize), with hopefully no noticeable change to the page layout. I also think a tweaking of some of the design elements could be helpful. A few small changes to the layout of the headers in each of the post boxes (the boxes our individual posts are in) would make implementing greymatter much easier, and, in my opinion, make the site a little bit nicer to look at. But, for the most part, I think things should stay the same here. I still like the sidebar image, and the way the page header looks (although I wouldn't be upset if the links could be rearranged to take up a bit less space), so they should stay. Anyway, that's my 2 cents, but I'm interested in hearing your opinion, so please drop me a line or two.
I have a whole other web design-related rant all planned out in my head, but I've written enough boring crap for one evening, so I'll save it for tomorrow. Have a good night.
Posted by on 23 July 2001 at 9:26 PM
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