Ben Bleikamp's blog about technology and college

Black and white and orange

The initial mockup of this design in Photoshop looks absolutely nothing like what you’re looking at now. It had a green background, 3 columns, s small footer and was probably a step backward from the previous version. After bouncing a few ideas off of Chris, this is what I have come up with.

The exterior

To start with, this is the most complete site that has ever graced the Bleikamp.com domain. Almost everything works. Sidebars change based on what page you’re viewing. I took the time to think a little bit more about typography (once again, thanks to Chris) and spent a lot of time playing with the layout, font sizes, widths, heights, and small stylistic elements that most people probably never notice.

I was playing with a lot of colors at first, but I finally settled on using a rusty orange as a “highlight” color and using black, whites, and some gray everywhere else. I also ventured from framing my site with a different background color giving it the “no boundary” feel. I thought about going fluid but decided against it.

I don’t have any formal training in design, so everything you see is trial and error getting font sizes and line heights to look “right.” I also tried to adhere to some of the typographic hints Mark Boulton has on his site - the keyword there is tried.

Under the hood

The site is run on WordPress, as usual. This is another decision that I put a bit of thought into. I had been playing with Django a bit but am not comfortable enough to build a full site with it.

I used WordPress conditional statements significantly more than I have in the past. Normally I use one sidebar on every page, but with this redesign I customized the sidebar a bit for each page based on what people are doing on a given page. It’s nothing incredibly fancy, but I feel like it’s a tiny detail that a lot of blogs ignore.

Of course, it’s still not done

This design is built to give me quite a bit of flexibility. I plan on editing, adding, deleting, and doing whatever else I can to make it a complete site. Like I said - this is the most complete site that has ever graced this domain, but that isn’t saying much.

UPDATE

Thanks Devin for pointing out that comments weren’t working. Spent a few hours figuring out the problem, turned out to be something simple. They work now - comment away!