As you can see, Good Blimey has a new look and feel. After two days of working on it, and a mere 15 minutes installing the excellent WordPress blogging software, you now see the results of the weekend’s work. If you’re familiar with the previous design (picture here – 166kb), you’ll be shocked by this drastic change. I wanted something that stood out and caught your attention. I know there’s a lot of feminine colors, but hopefully you can look past that as the theme of the site. When designing the site, I asked myself, “What 3 things do you like right now?” and the answer was; women, rockabilly, and food. Then I tried to figure out how to convey that into a design, and this is the result.
As always, the site validates in XHTML 1.0 Strict, and everything should work fine in all major browsers. There are still things I need to fix up, tighten up the layout a bit, and add accessibility features, but they shouldn’t take too long. Feel free to leave me a comment if you want to share anything about the new design.
Yowzers! I don’t drop by for a few days, and look what happens! Wouldn’t be my choice of colors (just personal preference, nothing wrong with them), but overall very nice. I think it conveys exactly what you wanted.
A few things you might look at (get your grain of salt ready):
1. Pare down the number of colors – the aggressive color scheme is fine, but I’d limit it to at most three main colors.
2. The
textareafor inputting comments overflows onto your menus on the right.3. The word-bubble image next to “comments” at the bottom of every post has a pink background instead of a white background. It stands out as being a bit “off”, but I couldn’t fiure out why until I looked closely.
Like I said, nothing major. It’s your site, don’t let me push you around on what you think it should look like ;) Overall, I really like the concept, I just think it could use a bit of refining.
If you haven’t been by my site in a few days, I’ve been working on my layout (nothing drastic), I’d love to hear what ya think.
Congrats on the redesign!
sexy, in a non-homosexual kind of way of course. Looks good and renders well in Safari, Mozilla 1.7 nightly 05/14/2004, IE and even is readable in Links text based browser.
Bloody hell Matt, seriously radical change and I love it. :D
Paul G: I always appreciate your thoughts. The number of colors; well, I didn’t want the site to feel monochromatic, and thought if I stuck with just pink, the site would feel too feminine. I’m still undecided about the color scheme on the whole, so I’m still weighing it. Textarea as well as some other things I’m definitely going to fix. I didn’t have time to when I switched to WordPress yesterday, and intend to fix it all today. I agree on the Comments bubble, I’m a horrible graphics person, I’ll try to fix that up. Thank you very much for giving me your thoughts. :)
mx & horai: Glad you both like it, thanks for the feedback! :D
Damn Matt…I’ve always wondered about you, and now I can say, you truly are a fruit! :)
Seriously looks, good, the colors are just a little feminine for my manly Marine tastes…
As I keep telling everyone, I’m in touch with my lesbian side. Too bad you Marines can’t say the same. :P
Well, I’m a chick, so I *love* the colors.. I find them very soothing. I like the change Matt. It’s very pretty. :)
Glad you like them, Cantaloupes. ;)
Nice work here Matt.
I love the tagline, I’m thinking that would make an excellent t-shirt, and if I ever had one I’d wear it to work (since there is no dress code where I work).
Thanks Kartooner, glad you like it. :) I thought the tagline is pretty neat too, it at least gives the site an element of humor that didn’t exist with the previous design.
I had seen your site for the first time a few days ago, I think via a link on Molly.com and really enjoy the design of your site a lot. It’s easy on the eyes, and put together very slick.
“Well, I’m a chick, so I *love* the colors.. I find them very soothing. I like the change Matt. It’s very pretty.”
See?!? I told you you were too busy touching your femininme side… ;)
I love the bold new look. I loved the bold old look, too. I guess I just like the way you think (doubts about your thought-process aside). ;)
Methinks Brian protesteth a little too much and loudly. :-)
Remember when you were a kid, and someone farted and someone would say “You smelt it, you dealt it”.. (implying that the first person who spoke aloud of the obvious stench, must in fact be the guilty party…)
Perhaps the same logic applies to Brian… his continual dislike of the color scheme gives querry to the thought that perhaps he’s denying his supremely internal pleasure of the colors, making him boldly call derogative attention to it, in hopes of not revealing to us all, that he is in fact in LOVE with the beautiful colors after all..
Things that make you go “Hmmmmmmm.”