Wow! It’s just great to be back. My website, blog, portfolio has taken a turn to be one of the best. I started this blog with categories like Life, Games, Computers, Anime and Web. All of it were interest close to my heart that I carried since high school through college. But since I started thinking about business, website designing as a very professional career, dreaming of providing a better working environment to hopefully my employees and share my knowledge with interested students and clients, I’ve matured and decided I needed to move forward.
That’s why I’ve made some significant changes to my blog. Focusing more on websites from the design point through to the business side and even latest news and articles. Not to mention I’ll be sharing my knowledge and views now tackling agendas having to do with the process of website development. So I hope everyone will welcome this change and if it does get too boring, I’ll create a seperate blog later on for all my ramblings and whatnots. :)
So what’s changed?
I’m sure firstly everyone noticed the design change of the website. Well, nothing to be proud and congratulate me because this is one of the default templates designed for the new MovableType (MT) 3.2. And speaking about the template design, MT currently has a plugin called StyleCatcher.
StyleCatcher is actually a template library to store all the templates you’ve used through the past. Like the example by MT, imagine when you’ve over 500,000 template designs to choose from in future and some day decide to swtich back to an older template. StyleCatcher eliminates the need to copy and paste the code of before but just switch templates. Neat-o!
However, there are setbacks I think.Designers/Developers would need to come up with the template according to a standard code structure, in this case it’s the SixApart standard. Noted by on the MT website;
We’ll soon be publishing more details about creating your own styles that fit the Six Apart standard, as well as stripped down templates with only template tags and basic markup for those of you who would rather get your hands dirty building your own HTML and CSS. This documentation should make it easy for designers and developers to see the benefits of this new markup structure, and why we’ve made these changes.
Well, I’ll await the release the of the markup and later try to carve out some templates for anyone using MT. Sorry Edrei, I don’t think I’ll be moving to WordPress anytime soon.
Progressing with the maturity of the website along with its content, I reorganized the categories into Current Projects, Life, Marketing & Business, News & Articles, Reviews, Website Fun, and Website Lessons. It has its good because this goes to show that the content provided here in future will be more concentrated on the topic of me trying to make websites simple.
The bad though might appear in some cases when you can’t really decide if the article, post or information posted belongs to either category. Hope I won’t have to go through with that too many times.
If you’ve clicked the Continue Reading link from the homepage, you’d notice the layout on this page bares close resemblance to the Kubrick one. I was actually surprised that it turned out like this, while having its good and bad. The good comes when your artcle is being paid more attention by your readers without any distractions. The bad is that the categories have gone missing and I can’t exactly tweak the CSS because it’s imported from the themes folder. The best I could do is add minor CSS of my own.
The blog design I had before was rather messy and disorganized because I placed the Google Adsense in empty places without paying attention to their positions. On account of that, my Adsense revenue was terrible. So with a few alterations and heavy thought, I think I’ve managed to place my Adsense in more strategic spots.
As much as I’d like to say this website is done, it’s still far from what I’d normally design for my audience. I’ll get right on it when SixApart finally releases the markup structure which I’m not sure if it’s their Default Temaples. Anyway, in the meantime I plan to add a few more goodies around like Related Entries, Technorati tags, and others.
I hope everyone will welcome the change I’ve made and I’m very grateful to readers who’ve followed my blog even if it was just for one post. I hope we’ll all learn together about the process of making websites simple.
Danny Foo
Website Designer
hey man, i think the direction you’re bringing your blog sounds good. Malaysia needs some fresh web design thoughts and web standards evangelism. anyway, good luck on your efforts. i’ll be visiting often :o)
Hey Danny, looks like u have a new template. No offense but i still prefer your previous template. This one look too striking blue and the design is not consistent because when you view in permalink your template shrink, you should maintain your width. Take care dude.
Yeah, I know that it converts to a single column like how Kubrick reacts in WordPress. But as I mentioned in the latest post, it’s MTs default template. So till I find the time to make my own, I’ll live with this for the time being.
Maybe I’ll try switching the background color to a light grey. :) Thanks for dropping by.
Cheers.
This design looks OK. Did you say this is the default template designed for the new MovableType? I have never tried MT, nor TextPattern, so I have no idea. My new blog (up for barely 1 week or so) is done in WordPress.
Hope I can continue to learn from you guys. Cheers.
Yup, this is one of the default templates on MT’s Style Library that you could apply with ease by using StyleCatcher. :) I heard TextPattern is very versatile but haven’t gone around looking at the code yet.
You’ve got a great blog going but I’d like to suggest making the top part of your banner slightly darker so visitors are able to read the Title and Description better. Try a slight darkish gradient from top. ;)
Cheers.