Another Blog Design

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Welcome to the new look jackosborne.co.uk. As you can see the appearance of the site has shifted considerably from it’s usual all white design to something that has a little more colour.

During my last post I highlighted that I was changing the way that this site works, instead of it being multi functional I decided to change it solely to that of a blog where I would be able to focus on my writing. As you can see, I’ve decided to get rid of my portfolio and about pages, these will feature in my other website which I will have more news on soon. Under the hood everything is still powered by wordpress as I believe that it is the best platform on which to run a blog. I’m still going down the HTML 5 route and I’ve also added dashes of wai-aria and microformats

The last time I redesigned the blog, in May, I decided to write a blog post detailing my journey with HTML 5 highlighting how certain sections of the site were created and areas I had trouble with. To date, that post has recieved the most views in this sites history, so as a result I think I will do more of the same again.

With this new site now up and running I am announcing that throughout the month of September I will be writing a series of articles decided to CSS, hopefully these will drum up some interest within the community and get some more traffic over here. I think I’ll aim for around four or five to begin with but ultimately I’ll need to see how I get on, hopefully I will have set myself an achievable target.

The reason I’ve decided to focus on CSS for my first mini series is because that is where my passion for web design lies. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the reason I’m even in a job. It may sound daft, but when I attending my first day of college and created the Hello World! page I knew this was the career for me. Initially when I set out my ideas for this website, I had a section decided entirely to CSS tip bits, everytime I learned a new piece of code I added it to my online library.

For the mini series I might start the first article off with an introduction to the basic elements and then as I progress I’ll ramp things up and focus on the newer techniques available within CSS3 such as border radius and -webkit-tranisitions.

As usual feel free to leave your comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new look but please note that this site is still very much finding it’s feet since the relaunch. If you find any problem areas don’t be shy, point them out.

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  • Who I am

    My name is Jack Osborne and I am a Glasgow–based designer and writer. You should follow me on Twitter.

2 Responses to “Another Blog Design”

  1. Mike Robinson says:
    August 26, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    The new design is absolutely fantastic mate! Definitely my favourite of yours so far.

    Now, you already know I was going to pull you up on this: I don’t agree with your use of aside. On posts I believe the meta data should be in a footer, and on your articles page it should be a nav.

    Finally, your about us box has taken over my arrow keys! Very bad when entering a comment or searching :(

  2. Jack Osborne says:
    August 26, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Thanks for taking the time out to comment Mike, I’m also quite happy with things turned out on the design front. It’s by no means perfect and there are alot of areas I still need to fix/modify but it’s getting there slowly but surely.

    I can totally see where you are coming from regarding the use of the aside element, it’s something we have both spoken about at great length and it is still something that is up for debate on the site. WhenIf I realise that my reasoning for using the aside were wrong then I won’t have any problems in swapping the element out for another one, hopefully.

    Finally, thanks for pointing out the arrow key problem, I thought I had taken out that piece of code but as it turns out I guess I haven’t. That’s something for me to sort this afternoon.* Whilst writing this post I’ve also realised that I have no ”register to see follow up comments box” so thats another thing added to the to-do list.

    If you find anything else get it down here, you know I value your thoughts and opinions.

    Edits
    * keypress problem has been rectified.

    I’ve also now swapped out the asides just to keep you happy ;) take a look over it, if you’ve got the time, and let me know what you think.