I desperately need to redesign this site. The problem is, as my regular readers (or, indeed, anyone looking at the current style) will know, I’m no designer. The current design was done over 2 years ago and was basically haphazardly put together by writing and rewriting the CSS until I had something that looked reasonable at the time. I don’t even have a logo.
So I’d like to ask for some help from my readers. There must be somebody out there with some design skills who would be willing to volunteer their time to draw something up. I don’t need, nor want, any too complex or time consuming, just a nice simple design that’s easy on the eye and easy for me to implement.
I’d also really appreciate a logo. Again, nothing too fancy, just something simple and effective that I could print onto my business cards, which is another thing I need. I keep getting asked for a business card, yet I don’t have any. I really should organise those before Web Directions next month.
So, if you’d like to volunteer your time and skills for this task, leave a comment or contact me privately. If I get a few volunteers, I’m happy for you to either work together to come up with one design or individually to come up with a few different possibilities.
As a blog, I see nothing wrong with the current design. It’s readable and readily conveys information. Too many Web designers are more interested in showing us their gee-whiz talents than meeting those two goals.
Do you really want a logo, which would just be another image file to slow the downloading for those of us still using dial-up?
The only change I would suggest is to make the right-hand sidebar (Other Resources) narrower. This would require putting the Search button under its input area.
David, as I said, I’ve had this design for 2 years now and I’m just getting tired of it. There’s also a really annoying bug in Firefox that I haven’t been able to fix, regarding the display: table-*; properties. It sometimes causes the other resources column gets pushed down to the bottom, instead of on the side.
As for the logo, I understand the issue of having too many images to download, but given that there are no images in the current design at all. In fact, there’s only one content image in the entire template, used for the Pay Pal donation link. I really don’t think one small logo would hurt too much.
But, if my readers like this design and don’t want it changed, I’m willing to listen. I’ll wait till I get a bit more feedback before making a final decision.