Same content, different style. (Or, what I did on my short vacation.)

Sites disappear; others are created. That nasty little railway station, devoid of taste and style, becomes an element of beauty in the landscape which first made it ugly.

— Rémy De Gourmont

If your only experience of these pages is in your feed reader of choice, you will see little, if any, difference. If you actually visit http://norman.walsh.name/, you will find it much changed. Well, changed anyway.

I think the result is cleaner and nicer, but I don't claim any particular graphic design skills. Perhaps the fact that it seems improved (to my eye) is a greater comment on previous inadequacies than present virtues.

Mostly, I've taken things away which is usually a good thing in design. It seems to work in Firefox, Safari, and IE. If you miss any of the missing features (heck, if you even notice), do let me know.

Comments welcome, of course.

Comments:

Very nice. Some comments: The search field should have a white foreground. Also, wouldn’t it be nicer if the “Search:” label was white to match the rest of the text in the head of the page? And the border around the search field looks very boring, at least in Firefox (the standard sunken look).

Posted by Nikolai Weibull on 17 Sep 2007 @ 11:06am UTC #

I like it. It reminds me of Tim Bray's Ongoing site design, which is a good thing.

Posted by Will on 17 Sep 2007 @ 08:37pm UTC #

The similarity to Ongoing is not coincidental. I'm sure I stole some of the CSS straight from Tim (thanks, Tim). My other (direct, I looked at it while I was hacking intent to copy bits of it) was Macness.com.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 18 Sep 2007 @ 04:34pm UTC #

I miss the old style :-[

Posted by Chris Chiasson on 19 Sep 2007 @ 10:35am UTC #

Do you miss something in particular, or just its aesthetic charm?

Posted by Norman Walsh on 19 Sep 2007 @ 10:56am UTC #

The old version had extensive hyperlinking in the sidebar which made it easier to find things ("what was that article Norm wrote sometime last year...") and encouraged exploration ("hm, that was interesting, wonder what else Norm has to say on this topic..."). I kinda miss that.

Posted by Joe English on 19 Sep 2007 @ 03:16pm UTC #

I'm not sure what links you mean, Joe. I didn't intentionally remove anything from the sidebar. Well, I guess the links to the archive, subject, and other indexes used to be on every page. I guess I could put them back.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 19 Sep 2007 @ 03:51pm UTC #

I left a comment earlier that you have a white-on-white color scheme for the "search" box. In other words, the background is white and the text is white with the outcome being that you cannot see what you are typing. It appears this is not the case for FireFox...but is for IE. In FireFox, the textbox is translucent so the white text contrasts with the background picture...not so in IE. The box is just white.

Posted by Matt on 24 Sep 2007 @ 09:10pm UTC #

Thanks, Matt. Fixed now. %@$#?!ing IE.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 24 Sep 2007 @ 11:41pm UTC #
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