Non-Profit Tech Blog

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Ok, this is a very late posting about the change in the look of the site. It’s a pretty radical design change for the blog. Here were my design needs:

• Flash became a pain in the butt. The olddesign was using SIFR — a great technology aimed at getting different typefaces into the Web from the standard Verdana, Georgia, etc. However, it also prevented users who only had Flash 6 from viewing the site properly. It looked great but only for people with newer systems.
• Cramped! I wanted to present larger screenshots and 500 pixels wide is just too narrow for a lot of things. I needed a design that gave me more white space and more space in general.
• Needed to load fast! Ok, I admit it. I sometimes add too many gewgaws to the blog. Ok, not just sometimes. I needed a design that could handle the stuff I threw in but also loaded quickly.
• Standards compatibility. I totally blew it on that one. Most of the old design was not standards-compatible.

And then… I saw the Sandbox. It’s a great theme technically speaking with more compatibility for more usability standards than you can shake a stick at. I actually had been looking at it for a while but thought, “Man! Is that theme plain or what?”. I’d even played around with other themes that were plain as well such as a WordPress port of the Scribbish theme for Typo and Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme.

So the Sandbox people, knowing that plain wasn’t actually creating demand for the theme, created a design competition. I looked and looked, trying one or the other theme, but the one that suited me the most was Will Wilkin’s Moo-Point theme. Will Wilkins, is a freelance web designer and developer, currently specializing in WordPress themes. He’s also a family man, a golfer, and a self-proclaimed geek. He loves photography and web design. That said, he’s also a really helpful guy as he actually spent the time to help me integrate MyBlogLog avatar pics in to the comments threads after each post.

I think the overall theme is great although my wife says, “Why such a huge font size? Are your readers old or something?” It’s true though — this blogger just had his thirty-seventh birthday. The real reason I felt good about this theme is that I started reading other blogs that use this theme and found myself reading posting after posting because it was just that easy to read. It’s also incredibly easy to modify as long as you don’t mess with the CSS too often. I’m more comfortable with .php files of this them than of any theme I’ve ever had to modify.