Ok, so the redesign. The site looks different but is it any good? Well I know it wasn't up until Friday if you were viewing it in IE. Man it looked terrible (and it's still not perfect). There were some other goals for the redesign as well most of which I think I've met.

The IE Thing

Please IE users. Do yourself a favour and get a more standards compliant browser.

If you're using IE you will be getting this ugly block above the posts telling you you should switch to Firefox (my preferred) or Opera. The really neat thing is that this box is displayed simply through IE's own flaws. Check out how.

Google Ads and Affiliations

You might notice that Google ads have reappeared on single post pages because I like the idea of making money from this website...but I don't. My previous stint with Google ads, which lasted about seven months, earned me a grand total of US$4.37. I need to get to US$100 to cash out, so it could be a while. I have also added an affiliations page because I have been linking to heaps of Amazon products recently. But again it's not for the money (I haven't made a single cent out of Amazon yet), I actually like the products I'm linking to and it would be silly not to at least have the possibility of earning some money from my recommendations (if anyone follows them).

Other Redesign Goals

The other goals were basically:

• Main menu buttons should have cool as can be icons - learn to design icons
• Fluid design
• Summer/spring feel
• No specific times of day on each post
• More visible discussion - I need more people to comment

Well I totally failed on the first one. I did manage a fluid design so you should be able to view the site reasonably nicely at any resolution (although the menu will wrap an look ugly if you're silly enough to still be on anything at or below 800x600). I think the design feels fairly summery, I could be wrong. Laura did ask If I wanted everyone to think I was a girl due to the overwhelming (it's not overwhelming is it?) use of pink. I don't, and I've since found a better colour but haven't bothered to implement it. Thanks to the Time of Day plugin I now don't have specific times of day for each post¹. More visible discussion has sort of been achieved with Brian's Latest Comments plugin now populating the sidebar, but I still need more people to comment.

1. This did totally break my daily, monthly and yearly archives pages but luckily I don't really use them. I also have more plans for the time of day thing but they might be a while. [↩]