Love that title! The theme that currently graces Sillyness is my 5th theme for Habari, titled Latest Crap.

The goals for this theme were pretty straightforward:

1. Place the emphasis back on my content, where it belongs.

2. Use less javascript and imagery.

3. Create a logical flow for the many facets of my online life

In the following paragraphs we will take a look at the differences in how each of these points was handled in the previous design, Crazy and LC as I like to call her.

Content, content, content

On this lovely site I am primarily a writer. I write about my life, my work and the interwebs. In my previous design it was more difficult to access my writing. The majority of it was hidden behind overflow:hidden and some cool fade effects:

Cool looking, but not as useable as I would like. So in the redesign I tried to make sure to have the content be more accessible, while not having 6,000 words load for the 5 posts that are accessed by every front page load:

I am still playing with the size of the excerpt, but I think I am happy with where it is currently.

No images were hurt while building this theme

In fact, none were used at all. I have long been a believe in using imagery as little as possible in site designs. You should build a beautiful, useable site without the help of imagery. Then if you really need them, sprinkle them around as necessary.

If you are in Safari, this site looks hawt. If you are running Firefox, it looks sexy. If you are in anything else, it looks like every other site. Go get a better browser, or check flickr to see what you are missing.

Now, please understand this is not me hating on Microsoft. The fact is that I want to build sites using CSS that is modern. I want to do things like round the corners on a div without resorting to loading an image. It isn't like I am wanting to lay my site out with CSS3 columns.

By the same token I felt like I was using too much js here and there that didn't really add much to the user experience. The only exception was the forever-scroll (tm) but as cool as it is, I had a footer in this design I actually wanted to see.

I might re-introduce some JS in the future, but for now I like that I am not relying on anything other than the markup and styles to get the job done.

Who am I really?

On any given day, I am a developer, writer, photographer or artist. Every once in a while I am a musician. I wanted to showcase all these sides of me, in a logical way that didn't just default to click on my lifestream.

As you can see, I have brought back the columned format I moved to in my theme 2008.

2008 was one of my all time favorite designs on Sillyness. It clearly placed the content out in front, while still having some fun with imagery. The only problem with 2008 was that it didn't lend itself well to showcasing different types of content, which if you remember was the crux of goal 3.

So when brainstorming LC, which is chris-code for while I was writing the HTML and CSS I tried to decide which sides of who I am, should follow which parts.

The codemonkey section was the easiest to decide on as position one. It is my lively-hood, as well as what I am best known for on the interwebs, and I have never really had a good place to let people know what I was working on currently. Problem solved.

Of course the next logical section would be my site entry content. The whole reason for this site is to allow me to be involved in conversations with all of you out there on the interwebs. I have been too busy to really dig in here and start posting again, but part of this redesign was to give me the push I needed to get back to writing. I have some new ideas for articles on WP development, Habari development, etc.

Boy, was this ever long

This new layout gives me the platform I need to get back to doing something I love, writing. I am also hoping to write more long form entries that will require more planning and research. Should be fun. Or it could be horror so profound that bards will sing melancholy songs of it for generations to come.

It's really a toss up on that one.