Analysis of the New Streamhead Design

If you’re visiting the site, you will undoubtedly have noticed the new design. If you’re following the site via the feed or e-mail, now is a very good time to click through and check out the new incarnation of Streamhead. In this post, I go over what went in to creating the new design and what is still to come.

The new design consists of surprisingly little coding and images, thanks to some great work by other people and a little by me:

• The Thematic theme framework is an incredible useful and solid foundation to build on. Creating a child theme is child’s play and you immediately get all the good stuff of Thematic. Adapting it’s CSS is even easier. Messing with the functions was a little harder, but I didn’t need to change a lot.
• If you have a reasonably new browser, you will also notice the custom font. I tried to give my blog something unique by adding a different font. I will be evaluating this choice in about a month. In the mean time, I really love the Oregon LDO font by Luke Owens. Together with the @font-face generator, adding the font to the page was a breeze.
• I haven’t mentioned SketchUp in a while, but I used it to create the header image. I tried and liked Kerkythea to render the image. And a little Paint.NET for the finishing touches. All of those are high quality free tools that almost any one should have on their PC.

Mix all of that with a little CSS and out came the new design. I like it a lot more than the previous, but we’ll see if it stays for just as long.

As always, nothing is ever really finished, so there’s a pretty large to-do list:

• For some reason, the colors of the header don’t match in Internet Explorer (they look fine in Firefox and Chrome)
• I will be adding a few more widgets in the sidebar. I’m not sure if it was popular, but I liked the random posts.
• The posts now use the WordPress build-in thumbnail and “more” features, which means I have to go over all posts and introduce those. I’m not particularly looking forward to this task, but it will make the frontpage and category pages a lot nicer.
• I don’t like the front page, I will be adding some “themed” areas and pages with a few selected posts, which will make it easier for people to navigate the backlog of the blog.
• and probably a ton more that will popup while I’m working on the others.

So stay tuned, this blog is evolving. And let me know what you think of the new look, I’m really interested in your opinion.