Introducing The New Iamdez.com

I’ve been blogging now for over a year. In that time I’ve learned a TON about myself and blogging in general. However being a guy who’s never happy until it’s just right, I had to do a major overhaul of the look and flow of my blog.

These changes were done with you (the reader) in mind.

My old style was too hard on the eyes with smaller text and black on white text. Also, it just didn’t seem personal enough to be MY blog. The connection that I intend to have between myself and you just wasn’t possible being that it was hard to stay on site and actually read through an entire post.

So, last night I spent about 5 hours browsing and trying out different new themes to use. I had three requirements:

Ease of theme customization
Simple
Easy to Read

Customization

Some of the free themes available are hideous and nearly unreadable, yet they made a theme, and I haven’t yet, so I won’t go into much detail on that. However, what did amaze me was that some of the “Premium Free” themes put out by companies selling their themes had absolutely horrible standards for the backend code. With some themes the CSS was often well spaced and took advantage of whitespace for cleanliness and then there were some where everything was on the same line.

I wasn’t so concerned with having theme options available since I’m just fine inside an already put together stylesheet, but if you’re designing a theme for someone else to use, try and make sure you separate out as many properties as you can, otherwise it ends up being a mess.

Simplicity And Ease of Consumption

There’s enough noise out there already. If you’re taking the time to come to my blog (thank you) and then read my posts I don’t want it to be a chore to find what you might be interested in or read the post you came into the site on.

Because of that I needed to find something that wasn’t highly contrasting and the text was large enough to read comfortably. I actually brought the text size from the theme’s default from 11px to 15px. I also wanted to make sure that the links were noticeable to the reader

Navigation was something that I needed to make sure was intact. this explains the header area being just a logo and links:

There’s no flyout menus. There doesn’t need to be. You should be able to get to exactly where you need to get to. Thinking of that, I should probably add an RSS feed link on the end (that’ll probably be there by the time you read this).

Making A Personal Blog More Personal

What could possibly make a personal blog more personal than your own handwriting? That’s exactly what I did. The font doesn’t exist except when there’s a pen in my hand. It took all of 5 minutes to do and originated on a Clockwork notebook with its grid goodness.

Thank you for reading my random wanderings around the web, and stay tuned for more and a new weekly feature coming up in the next few weeks. I’m excited about it and it should be awesome with a dash of coolness.

–dez