I’ve been mucking around with my CSS over the past few days. Gone are the vertical grey lines and greeny colour scheme. I’ve kept the pacific green colour in the site title though, as a keepsake of the old style. Plus that colour is sort of identified with me now and my favicon uses it.
It’s all about the whitespace and I’ve tried to make that more prominent. The homepage has been modified along those lines – I now use excerpts so people can easily scan the content. That’s allowed me to include more links to previous posts on the homepage. I’ve cut back on the content in the menu too – the blogroll and references now have their own pages.
I’ve reverted to traditional link colours in the body text, as a nod to the oldstyle Web. The only exception is the linkblog content on the right-hand side of the homepage, which needed to blend in more so I used underlined black text.
Regarding the vertical lines, I think I originally had those mainly to show off my table-less CSS design 😉 Well, that and there were (and still are) 3 distinct columns in my design. But now I’ve gotten rid of the vertical lines, I think because I wanted to free myself from the box-like constrictions they conveyed. A subtle and psychological change, and my reason for it is a bit artsy-fartsy, but hey it works for me.
There are some other minor mods and I will probably do some more tinkering, but then that’s the beauty of style sheets. All it takes to change the design of a whole website is some spanner work on the CSS.
Update: I’ve gone to a centered layout (boooring!). This new design is All About The Whitespace, so it works better if it’s centered. I think I’m done now… maybe a bit more tinkering with the header.