apropos of anything

I miss my old site design.

There, I said it. It was clean, simple, pretty. It had Lucinda Grande font. If only I knew enough about the WordPress codex to be able to convert it to use with the new content management system…

Until then, I suspect I’m going to continue to play with the site design until I find one that works. I’m not sure what I think about this one yet. It took hours just to do the homepage, so if you navigate further in you’ll see the original colors and design (and I’m not completely done with the homepage either, but… it’s late); as this is by far the most complex template I’ve fiddled with so far, I don’t know if I want to spend the time doing the work for the other pages if I ultimately don’t like the design, so I’m going to leave it like this for now and see if maybe it grows on me.

Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll make me want to hurl.

I like the extra colors on this design. It incorporates images more than the my old WordPress template did; in fact, it almost forces me to hunt for photos to associate with each post. It also restores an area for quick links that don’t merit a full post. I’ve missed that since migrating over to WordPress. Sometimes I want to throw up a link, but I don’t really have much to say other than, read this, it’s great.

On the other hand, it only puts one full post on the homepage, which means the recent post list (that I had edited out of the other WordPress templates) becomes mandatory if I want to make any other content easily accessible. This design also doesn’t incorporate a blogroll, so I added it in anyway… which makes the right column waaaay longer than the left one. And of course, that bugs me, because I am easily disturbed by things that do not balance.

I temporarily removed the search bar to expand the full header graphic because the half-graphic just looked truncated and stumpy, so I have to remember to put that back in tomorrow, or whenever I have time to finish poking around the code.

Until then, I’d really love to know what y’all think.

Update: Somehow I’ve managed to break the featured post. Am beginning to think possibly this new design is just way too much work….