New safetygoat!
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Well, well, well! I said I was going to fix up safetygoat, and it’s taken me a lot longer than I thought….but it is here! It has been a time consuming endeavor. For example, adding in a simple plug-in often took three hours of frustration (followed by 2 minutes of knowing bliss!), sometimes two days, but it was never as simple as people said (which leads me to believe that I’m a wordpress retard). I will post code snippets that I figured out in the coming weeks so hopefully others will learn from all my pains (and hopefully the codies out there will tell me if I’ve done a really big ‘faux pas’ or two!).
Some of the things I really wanted were easy-ish… getting flash and jpgs into the same gallery for my portfolio, for example, but my main goal was to make the front page more interactive. This meant having haikus that people could scroll through and add to, a sneak peak into my portfolio (I’ve grown quite fond of that frame and don’t feel bad for one second about how much of your bandwidth I’m taking up!), somewhere where I can pull in photos of safetygoat that other people have taken (add yours to my flickr group!), as well as feeds for my last.fm, brightkite and twitter. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be tweaking it and testing it in different browsers, but I would appreciate all of you lovely people to take a look through. If you could let me know if you spot any bugs, or if you have any tweaks I can make to just tidy it up, I will put on my tough girl skin and take your advice lovingly into my arms.
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Very nice!
I like the little touches like the scrolling photo frame for your portfolio and the last.fm feed.
Also, thanks for linking to me site
Thanks mate! Well, you have a good site, so why not give you a nice link
Kat – excellent job on your redesign! You’ve found a perfect confluence between your totally original, quirky safety goat theme and illustrative style, and contemporary web design aesthetics. Some specific comments and suggestions for you:
I love the RSS feed link! Wouldn’t have noticed except that I stumbled over it on my way home. The way the albums float up from your Last.fm seaweed is delightful, and I don’t even want to know how you did it!
The menu items dropping down is nice and the way the one you’re on is longer works well (though it needn’t change when you rollover it?)
Where the H4’s appear w/out a date separating them from the paragraph (as per blog), they are too close to the paragraph of text below (e.g About page)
I want the side links on the blog pages to have illustrated headers like the ones on the homepage – e.g. could you replace Blogroll with the ‘links’ header?
Feels like there is a bit too much space at the bottom of the page below the content and above Safety goat – be nice if there was some part of that illustration that reached up into the background of the content area of the page so that it entices you into scrolling down to the bottom.
I also love the frame on the homepage for the portfolio. Almost wish the haiku box was in something equally rich or illustrative.
Good work!
Thanks hun. Your suggestions are fantastic. I think you are definitely right about all of them. There are a few other things I want to do as well… the footer is a bit unbalanced, and I want the frame thingy on the homepage to link the images to the portfolio. I should have the changes done in the next week…. I wanted to get the redesign up as quickly as possible, even though I wasn’t 100% happy with it yet. Thanks for the help