As you probably (hopefully) noticed, I’ve redesigned the layout for DrikoLand. One impetus for change is the recent 1,000,000th hit on my ‘80s Site (woo hoo!), which is spurring me on to revamp a lot of that site (still working on that; more news soon, I hope). However, the blog has also become a little stagnant, I think, so I’m finally implementing some of the ideas I’ve been jotting down for a while now.
I’ve tried to keep the main elements of the site the same, like the overall color scheme and the logo. I may yet change some more, but this is it for now. Here’s a summmary of most of the changes, and some rationales for them if you’re interested. If not, skip on down to the end…
- The most obvious change is a move (back) to two columns from three, with a fixed width. I decided on a fixed width of 800 pixels so that the site should look pretty much the same to anyone with a screen width of 800 pixels or more, which is about 95% of you, according to my site stats. This allows me to better visualize the addition of large images in posts, as I now know exactly how things will look to everyone. Although I will point out that M$ Internet Explorer still doesn’t render some things like it should, which caused me to tear my hear out over several spacing issues that worked perfectly in Firefox.
- With the switch to two columns, I deleted and reordered several of the elements in the previous two sidebars.
- Two search boxes in the right sidebar are now a single search box that just searches the DrikoLand blog, versus the WWW or the entire driko.org domain. I never used the Technorati search box, and the new Google Blog Search is at least as good. I may want to add back a means to search the entire site, though.
- I got rid of the “Useful Links” section that was in the left sidebar altogether. Although nostalgic in that those pages still retained design elements from the mid- to late-’90s, they were rife with broken links and I don’t think anyone really visited them. I plan on slowly adding working links from those pages and from my extensive personal bookmarks into del.icio.us, so the categories in the right sidebar will probably grow as I add those in. That will allow you (and me) to access all of my bookmarks (and post links) from any location, which will be kind of nice, I think.
- I moved the navigation bar up top to below the logo, as I think it helps the logo stand out more. I debated getting rid of the navigation bar altogether, but since I find myself using it, I decided to keep it around.
- I changed some formatting, like making blockquotes surrounded by a shaded box so they stand out better. There are some minor font changes that shouldn’t be all that evident except that I cleaned up the underlying CSS.
The next step will be to move away from a table-based layout to one that utilizes CSS, which will make future changes much easier and will also help me to standardize formatting across the entire site. One step at a time, though… 
Please let me know what you think! If you actually used something that I got rid of, let me know and I’ll see if it can be reincorporated. If you have any other suggestions for additions or changes, I’d appreciate them as well.
