Fresh Look Thanks to CSS

A couple of days ago I was catching up on some articles from Design Meltdown and came across his recent post on sites that use a lot of brown to communicate a certain mood and feeling that is somewhat disconnected from technology. The color tends to give the feeling of warmth, comfort, and welcomeness.

As I was looking at the example sites that he posted, to my sheer surprise, mine was one of the examples. Looking at some of the others and reading his article inspired me to take the brown feel a step further. Yesterday I mocked the style that I wanted my site to have in my head. This morning, I went ahead and laid it out in Photoshop.

Last year when I redesigned my site, I made sure that I used proper CSS techniques so that if I ever did want to update the look of my site, I could do it easily. It only took me about 3 hours to do (which included the actual designing in Photoshop). I thought that was quite good! The actual implementation of the changes in the site maybe took about 45 minutes--which is about 30 minutes too long. This has to do with some things that I would have done differently to make it more effecient. No big deal.

I also designed the new look with in mind that I was going to keep a lot of the same elements. The navigation bar was NOT one of them however. Yet, once I placed the header on the page the navigation bar was just a little below the header this time (as opposed to being a part of the header as it was before), and I decided to keep it this way and tweak it a little.

Finally, everything else pretty much fell into place. I changed the colors a little of the text and links, but for the most part everything else is the same. It's amazing how much just the background and the header of a page can change the look of the whole site.