Aphoenix Dot CA Looks Different!

Well, I changed up how aphoenix.ca is looking. I'm moderately happy with the overall effect, though I reserve the right to revert to the old look at any time. I'm already cooking up a scheme for the next look and I'm getting ready to start posting in my photoblog again (the photos are now going to be integrated into this part of the blog). On the topic of the photoblog - I just bought a new camera. It's a Canon Digital Rebel XTi and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, though it has really highlighted the fact that I'm not a particularly good photographer. I am enjoying playing with it, though, and that's why I got it.

Now for a brief description of why things look the way they do:

I kept a simple 2 column design because I didn't want to introduce any real weirdness to the blog. I briefly considered an advertisement column, but I remembered that I don't get any money from ads anyways because nobody clicks on them, so I kept it simple. I moved the menu to the right hand side, because I want the focus to be on the content, not what is surrounding it. I wanted to keep black-on-white for text and background, but I felt that too much whitespace was a detriment in the old look, so I kept the whitespace to the content column. The background is a repeating open-source graphic that I changed fairly significantly to get looking right. I drew all of the other graphics by hand, which was difficult when you are as artistically moronic as I am, but I think they came out all right. The idea is kind of inspired by Mac OSX (yes, I know I sometimes complain about OSX - it's still pretty). The idea is to look like vaguely metallic windows. The logo is text on a motionless background, easily read by screen readers.

It's working remarkably well in a screen reader - I didn't have any significant issues jumping around from post to post. I'm pretty happy with how this is implemented and I'm also very happy with how little effort I had to put in to get it looking like this. I spent about 2 hours drawing the graphics and about 25 minutes implementing the look and feel. There are a few minor things that I need to still get working:

• The breadcrumbs ("this article posted in X and X")
• Extended menuing. I'm torn between flyout menuing and displaying different menus on drill-downs. More clicks vs. more clutter.
• Better ad placement. I am currently generating no revenue, but I don't really mind because I'm doing this for fun not profit. But I think that I could place the ads a little more strategically so that one-time visitors see them.