Slightly Remarkable

Cameron Moll elaborated on his “Good designers redesign, great designers realign” phrase in an A List Apart article. Although at first Cameron’s message sparked controversy deep inside of me — I greatly enjoy designing web sites, even if there is no reason to do so — I’ve come to realize that he is indeed correct.

So, following Cameron’s outline, I want to go through a few questions so I can attain my Realigner badge.

First, why am I redesigning? It’s more than the CSS Reboot, and it’s more than the fact that I like to keep my site fresh and spiffy. Those are the reasons of a Redesigner, but in addition to those reasons, I’ve redesigned realigned my site to become more content-oriented and streamlined; I want navigation to be simple yet very accessible, I need a wider sidebar, but I also need a larger, more focused content area. I want to make my del.icio.us links and extended content into more like a secondary blog in the sidebar. Lastly, I want to change the way the site functions when viewing blog entries themselves; you should be able to skip to the comment form, there should be more information about the post, its author (me!), and other posts related to it.

Second, not a whole lot on the site needs to change, but a complete redesign is in order because these changes bring other challenges that a modification of the current design could not fulfill.

Third, the redesign isn’t the prettiest work I’ve ever done, so I don’t expect to get awards for my design. For now, my interest is focused on the content primarily, and the design secondarily. It will look nicer next time I redesign, as I’m sure by then I will have more solid reasons for redesigning (yes, I’m talking about May 1st, but that’s still six months away).

And fourth, obviously because I’m part of the CSS Reboot, I’ll definitely publish the redesign all at once on November 1st. However, for those of you who dislike my redesign so much that you can’t bare to look at it, I will be offering a theme switcher so that you can return to my older design at any time. I must warn, though, that in the future no modifications of past themes will be made, so those designs may become obsolete or even non-functional as I progress through new designs and add new features to the blog.

So, are you a Redesigner or a Realigner?