For the RSS readers out there, I have slightly tweaked the hyku.com design. I had planned on doing a complete revamp, but I have too much client work going on to get a complete overhaul done. With that, I just tweaked some things and adjusted the nav a bit. As such, it's not v6.0 it's v5.1. More details below the photo.
The changes are very slight and many people won't be able to tell much of a difference, but here they are:
- I moved the primary navigation from above the photo to below it. The old location always felt disconnected since it was so far away from the primary content space. It also required a bit of mouse-travel to move around.- I updated the primary navigation links. The wiki is gone, but I added speaking, travel and photography. The new items are a part of what I do and who I am.
- I wanted to put more emphasis on my original photography at the top. To do this I increased the size of the photo slightly. The rotation is still there and currently features 70+ unique photos. More coming soon.
- On the blog I revamped the the entry listing, specifically removing all the linking, digg, etc. items. I felt they cluttered the content and didn't add much functionality.
- Another major issue was Flickr integration. Currently the medium sized photo on Flickr is 500 pixels wide. The previous blog design couldn't handle a 500 pixel wide image in the entry body. As you see, the screen shot above is 500 pixels wide.
- The overall design features some new fades and highlights to make the design more current.
- The CSS is cleaner and I cleaned out a bunch of old files from the server - yay!
There are a number of other slight changes in the works for when I get some time to do them. Specifically, I will be updating the blog sidebar and adding a revised footer element.
One more thing...this blog runs on MovableType, although I am always asked if it's on WordPress. I work frequently in both platforms and I have no real preference.
Visitor Comments
Like the changes, Josh. I love the way you've got it set up to tell us what each of the different header images is. It makes me quick to click through the RSS just to see what cool image I'll get to see.
Posted by: Chris Cree | February 3, 2007 12:44 PM
Chris thanks for the compliments. A number of blogs now have a basic header-photo-rotation thing, but I've been doing it a while and wanted to make it somewhat unique.
Posted by: Josh Hallett | February 3, 2007 1:37 PM
"...specifically removing all the linking, digg, etc. items. I felt they cluttered the content and didn't add much functionality."
Most of the Young Democrats chapters in Georgia are moving their sites onto a pre-fab hosted solution that I'm not crazy about, but one of their concerns was that the inability to add all the tagging buttons to the blog template a la Blogger didn't quite mesh with their new SMO vision. I said I didn't think it was a real loss, as it seems to me that any reader who would know WTF it meant to Digg something or mark it in Magnolia has probably already got the buttons already added to their Firefox toolbar, and the ones who would need the template buttons on the blog itself are still wondering why things look funny in IE. Glad to see an authority apparently feels the same way.
Posted by: shelbinator | February 4, 2007 3:15 PM