A redesign, because it was time

I'll tweak it for weeks, I'm sure, but here it is: the latest iteration of Small Initiatives site design.

Why?

Mostly because the old design felt too Spartan, too flat, too texty. The colors were flat, chosen from the "Web-safe palette" that has since become irrelevant. And the liquid layout did not always present text at dimensions suitable for easy reading.

Most of the site contents resemble a Weblog, so text naturally dominates. But I had sharply limited the use of images to keep the site friendly for narrowbanders out there.

In the nearly two years since the old design launched, though, I learned a lot about how to optimize site structure. This design keeps things lean and mean even with additional imagery. Meanwhile, I suspect more of the site audience gets here via broadband anyway. Either way, this site runs pretty fast.

To finish the prototypes for this redesign, I made many, many decisions in recent weeks: fixed vs. liquid layout; full vs. truncated posts on the home page; categories vs. a single blog thread; fixed pixel sizes vs. relative; centered vs. flush-left page blocks; top navigation vs. left or right.

You know, all the things you always decide when working on a Web site.

As time permits, I'll write more about how I arrived at the decisions I made on each of those topics and more. First, I have to go in and put the new look on the old, static archives (mostly leftovers from a PostNuke installation I abandoned in 2002). Batch search-and-replace -- thank my stars for built-in grep in BBEdit!

Meanwhile, please file browser checks and bug reports here. I'm sure I missed plenty of glitches. Think of it as a scavenger hunt.