I still have some work to do on the sub pages and the sidebars but I figured I would toss it up now and that would inspire me to actually get it done faster and that way you could see the work in progress.

Let me know what you think and what you find that might be broken still.

Anyways, last night I had some fun refreshing my design and my styling and ended up totally revamping the header of the site.  

The header: One of the things I’ve felt for a while was that the black bar was unbalanced and the header was getting a little unorganized.  So I totally revamped it and simplified it.

New Icon: I added a new logo/icon to represent my theme of missional in suburbia.  Here’s a good test of its meaningfulness: Can you interpret its symbolism?  (Update: I’ve tweaked the icon a bit because it was so similar to another logo for a web hosting company.  I actually like what this one portrays more than the first one. I’ll be posting on why I chose this one soon).

No Picture of Me: I took away the picture of me. I’ve always thought it was helpful to see a picture of an author on the back of a book. For some reason this helpful as I read the book.  I was using that same approach for my blog but I’m up or a change.  If you really need to look at pictures of me, you can go to my facebook page or my twitter account.  On second thought, if you really need to look at some pictures of me, stop everything you are doing, call a counselor and get some help.

No more black bars: I ditched all the black bars that were on the site including the one in the header and the ones in the right sidebar.  I felt they were really “heavy” and enjoy the subtle feel of the grey. 

I would love to hear what you think or if you see anything that sticks out as unhelpful.  

I know that the site doesn’t render perfectly for Internet Explorer 6 but its definitely readable.  Consider this my encouragement for you upgrade already!

Phew.

Now I’ve got to go get my youngest child from the grips of his big brother!

Here are some of my thoughts about Twitter:

Twitterrific is essential for Twitter
This little application allows me to publish updates and see my friends’ updates from my desktop.  This means I don’t need to visit the Twitter website in order to use it. If i did, I probably wouldn’t use it as it would be a big waste of time.   There are other apps out there for PC users but I think Twitterrific is the best of the bunch.

Twitter + Facebook + AIM
With the use of Twitterrific & the twitter sync facebook app I am able to update all three of my status messages at the same time.   I am on AIM almost all day long and I used to always say stupid stuff on my status message.  I also use Facebook, albeit my use of it is very limited.  I mainly use it to keep in touch with people in my church but this allows them to see all my stupid updates too.

Updates or Stupid Thoughts?
Twitter posts are meant to be updates that answer the question, “What are you doing.”  I often post that but I also like to use it to just say stupid stuff.  I am not sure that people really need to know what I am doing all the time.

Twitter and my blog
With the use of a plug-in for WordPress called Twitter Tools I am able to put my latest update on the header of my blog.  This plug-in also allows me to notify my twitter friends when I write a new blog post.  This has really helped drive traffic to my blog and has increased the amount of interaction I’ve had in the comments (which, by the way, I really like!)

Twitter Friends
It’s interesting how I have made some new friends/acquaintances by using Twitter.  There are also a few long distance friends who I am able to be in in contact with more via AIM and Twitter than some of the people in my church.

Privacy & Twitter
Now, you might be thinking that you don’t really want people everywhere knowing what you are doing all the time.  That’s why is nice that Twitter allows you to protect your updates.  This means that only people who you let follow your updates can do so.  This is especially good when I am out of town and I don’t want the whole world knowing my family is home alone.

Twitter & Church
I first started using Twitter because I thought it would be cool to have a bunch of people from church on there.  I thought it would be a cool way to stay in touch and share prayer requests and stuff like that.  As of now, there are only about 4 people from my church using Twitter so that has not really worked.  But, if you are interested, The Well has a twitter account. I haven’t posted to it for a while because The Well doesn’t have any friends.  Maybe if it had friends, I would update it more…

So, there it is.  That’s most of why and how I use twitter.  Feel free to go ahead and ask to follow me if you already use twitter.  Unless you follow 1000 people I’ll likely accept your request.  If you don’t use twitter, sign up and give it a try (no, I don’t get any referral money for that suggestion!)

• The Site width is now 960px instead of 1000px.  I hope this gives the design a little more breathing room.
• I reduced the font size a bit.
• Simplified the header
• Tried to make the section titles a bit more bold (as i want to highlight the little sayings in throw in there).
• I put the feeds up at the top.
• I only have two full posts showing now, the rest below it are excerpts (for you geeks out there, this was done by using two looks and i queried posts, then offset the bottom section by two posts)
• I moved the flickr photos down to the sidebar so the header could be simpler.
• For the web geeks: I got rid of a bunch of poor markup and also reduced the CSS file by 236 lines.
• I went with bolder lines and borders. Why? I just like it, okay.
• I probably did some other stuff… but I forget.

Note, its too late for me to check to see if the layout breaks in IE for windows.  If it does, let me know and I’ll try to fix it for you.

What do you think?

Anyways, I personally think these ads are fairly un-intrusive. I am actually going to take all the money I receive off these ads and put them toward our adoption debt. So, it’s for a good cause!

Let me know if you are completely offended by these ads or see anything inappropriate pop up.

i am also re-creating my blog roll on the right sidebar. If you don’t see your blog there I either don’t like you anymore or I just haven’t added it yet. Hopefully its the latter rather than the former!

I recently bought a virtual-dedicated server with Media Temple and have been trying to figure out how in the world to use the thing. I finally spent a few hours getting my blog set up as a trial and will soon move some of my clients to this server as well.

What is the difference? Well, there should be very, very little downtime on my site and it should be a lot faster now that the server is not shared with thousands of other domains. Hopefully it will make your browsing of my site more enjoyable…

I’ll still recommend dreamhost to people who need some budget hosting. In fact, go ahead and click here to use my referral code to register.

By the way, you’ll notice that my domain is redirecting to an IP address. Anyone know if that is normal and will eventually switch over as it propagates? Or did I do something wrong?

Update:

New Year Cleaning:
I’m not sure how much of a difference you’ll notice but I cleaned up the site a bit more. I took off that intro bar underneath the header and moved the “hey” section to the sidebar. I did a few other minor things to the formatting of the posts, mostly things that you probably won’t notice but have been driving me nuts for a while.

Quotables:
Then I added a new section of the site called “Quotables” which will be where I will post quotes from some stuff I am reading.

Feeds:
I added some feed buttons in the right sidebar to make it easier to subscribe for all of you people who use a feed reader like google reader or bloglines.