Clickfire Site Redesign

It’s a beautiful, graphically optimized, fully validating sunny fall day outside. Why am I ablogging?

The new Clickfire site design is finished!

Some things about the new design that I really like are:

The Logo - Even though the previous logo went through some serious obsessive compulsive iterations, I am convinced that the new one is fresher, more cheerful and colorful. I admit an attachment to the heavy handed mouse and fire components, but I believe the less overt new one is going to better serve.

Code Improvements - No more table containers. To my surprise, I was able to drop the content into the CSS divs in my favorite WYSIWYG editor (the name begins with a “F,” not a “D,” by the way. I have cleaned up most of the old pages, some dating back years ago to when I first started learning CSS. The new pages are in XHTML and tend to have a better chance at validating. A few hybrid pages are still floating around.

Colors - It’s goodbye green, beige and black and hello red, green blue on white. I got complaints about the previous colors being to loud and this finally sank in. I struggled with going to a white background because white just plain hurts my eyes as do fluorescent lights and flash grenades. Toning down the contrast and brightness in my LCD monitor pretty much gets rid of the pain. I hope the new color scheme will improve the user experience. From what I’ve read, dark text on white backgrounds seems to be the preferred user interface scheme.

Credits - Thanks to Sergios Singeridis for taking our rough ideas and turning them into a reality. He’s a rock star web designer and very pleasant to work with. Terima kasih to my wife for helping get the content and graphics integrated. I so completely in love with WordPress. The blog uses the default WordPress theme based on the Kubrick, designed and built by Michael Heilemann and released under GPL. Most of all, thanks to God for giving me the patience to undertake this!

Overall, I think the new design is cleaner, faster and easier to navigate. There is no turning back, especially considering the time invested in plopping all the old content into the new static XHTML pages. Now, I can finally do what I really intended on doing with the site, publishing viewpoints, tools and content.

My question to you: What do you think of the new design?

Okay, time to head out for some sun.