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Rebooted

So here it is at last, the rebooted Watchmaker Project 3.0 (although technically it’s actually the sixth incarnation, only two of the previous ones really count).

Hopefully my .htaccess hackage will mean that existing RSS subscribers will now receive the updated FeedBurner powered feed; if you don’t want to receive every single update, just update your feed subscriptions (see the bottom-right of the homepage for the various options now available).

So, what do you think?

About the ‘boot

I think this is the first design for the site that I’ve been really happy with, at least in part because it makes me feel that I am progressing in my development as a ‘designer’ (or am I supposed to call myself a ‘re-aligner’ now?) It’s a fluid layout (although I have to admit it does feel a little cramped on 800×600), and was originally to have featured the latest in current blog trends – fixed comment forms, slide-out Ajax-powered live search, all that jazz – but sadly I ran out of time to implement all of those. Perhaps they’ll pop up in a future “realignment”...

Nodes of inspiration

The original idea for the design came from an article that I read on (I think) Luke Wroblewski’s interface blog, where he mentioned that inspiration can often be drawn from nature, for example by making the background of a page shade from dark to light, top to bottom, to mimic the sky.

“Hey,” I thought, “why not just use the actual sky instead?” So I did. I may at some point make it a random sky tile for a bit of visual interest (or perhaps even hook into a weather feed a la Dunstan, and show you what the sky looks like where I am at any given time).

The flowers kind of tie in with the outdoorsy-nature theme (with a little nod to Mr Oxton, the original flowery blogger), and are useful as pointing devices, guiding the eye to the main content in the centre of the page.

The choice of Tahoma for main body text is lifted directly from Particletree, where I found it a readable change from Verdana or Trebuchet (I see they are also rebooting too – go check them out).

I’ve also added a few bits of meta information to each article; you can now bookmark each post within del.icio.us, and they are also Technorati tagged for your convenience. Whether these steps will actually add any value remains to be seen.

A realignment of purpose

I’ve already talked a little about the somewhat new direction certain parts of this site will be taking in the future, and – as soon as I finish writing this – I will start adding entries to the Projects area. Each individual project will have its own RSS feed, so if someone discovers the site through a music connection they can keep up with my progress without sifting through all the noise of web design entries.

There are a few other little touches I particularly like; the homepage title features a random song lyric (thanks to Drew McLellan’s dru_random_text plugin), article dates are nicely formatted, and the sidebar entries are now also commentable and bookmarkable. The comment form used to slide neatly into place and then be fixed as you scrolled, but somehow I broke my script and haven’t had time to fix it yet.

Known issues

The main thing that still needs looking at is the content of the header – apart from the homepage it remains resolutely empty as of this writing; I’ll copy the search form across, but I don’t really have a clear idea what else to put in there, apart from a vague notion of “cross-selling” other parts of the site from within each section.

There were a couple of bugs on Mac browsers, mainly relating to the comment form checkboxes, and the footer was not appearing at all on Safari 1.2 (can someone with 2.0 tell me whether it’s there for them?), and I’ve dropped support for IE5 completely due to it’s general crapness at handling PNG transparency and z-indexes.

Apart from that (plus a to-do list as long as your arm – first on the list, get the contact form working), I think we’re good to go. Perhaps a little bit early, but I know I’m not the first (Bryan, Ann)... ;)

Please let me know what you think, any bugs you find (arse, the footer is screwed up on the homepage already) or anything else you want to share. Thanks for looking – and good job (again!), Adam.

Filed under: The Site, Internet.

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