Todd Hiestand

A Gradual Redesign…

December 20, 2006

If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that I have been changing the design little by little for the past few months. I think I finally landed on a semi-final version that I am happy with. Here’s a basic rundown of the changes for those of you who care….

Site Width:
I am now officially oppressing those who are running an 800×600 screen because I widened the site width to 900px. If you feel oppressed, welcome to the year 2000.

Extreme Makeover Footer Edition:
You probably are thinking, “oh look, a new list of colored links in the sidebar that I have never seen before.” Well, those links have been here for a long time, but hidden in the footer where you never look. I wanted to highlight the other aspects of my life and figured I should make them more accessible. I shrunk them a bit and moved them to where they would actually be useful. The footer is now a simple bit of info about the site and a tribute to my webdesign Yoda, Matt Heerema.

My Recent Books:
I’m using LibraryThing to organize my books (with a little help from Delicious Library) and in the sidebar you’ll see book covers from random books. The covers link to Amazon.

Single Post Goodness:
I did some major work on the single post pages. I added a little bio container to the end of each post. I have found that when I visit a blogpost that has been linked from another, I always want to know a little about the author as I read. So now, when people visit my site and land on a post, they find out a little about the me.

Related Posts:
In the single post page, I also added a “related posts” container to give people some more reading if they so desire.

Comments:
I also did some major reformatting of the comments area. Hopefully this will make them a little easier to read and to comment.

Oh, and in case you care (which you probably don’t) the css and xhtml validate. That makes me happy and proud of myself. :)
Those are the major changes…see anything else that would help? What do you think?