Tricklin

I put the finishing touches on my new design this past weekend, and I'm pretty happy with the results. It still maintains that clean look, but I've added a bit of pop to it with the addition of the background, a few footer additions, some font fixes, and other miscellaneous modifications.

The first thing I added was a new background, that fills the left and right sides of the content with a bit of color. The beauty of this implementation, is that the diagonal lines, are actually a repeating transparent PNG. This allows for me to change the background color to anything I please.

Along with the new background change, I also decided to keep a piece of the old design. My wife commented that she really like the image of the leaf cradling the droplet of water, and I agree with her. It's a nice image, and I feel it has become a sort of staple of the site. Because of this, I decided to put right back where it was. Because I'm using transparent PNGs for this, the background color, and the leaf don't appear for IE6 users, and I'm okay with this. I don't want to bend over backwards for a browser that doesn't support transparent PNGs.

I also added a bit more to the footer. I feel that this adds a nice touch, that remains consistent throughout the site. So, from any page on the site, the visitor always has the ability to my latest posts and the most recent comments.

The comments on the site were a bit bland, so I spruced them up with a background and a border, and reimplemented the gravatar. I really like the concept of the gravatar as it adds more personality to the comment author, and helps provide recognition if they've made more than 1 comment on the site.

The last thing I did was make the logo, and the navigation into images. This guarantees that all visitors will see the same thing. Before, I was only using a font in the style sheet, which meant that if a visitor didn't have that font on their computer, then they wouldn't see it the way I wanted them to. Plus it provides for smoother looking letters.

Overall, I really like the new look and feel. It's much less busy than the old site, but still has some nice features. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as well.