A bit of sprucing up

This summer I’ve been working on a couple of fun projects for a non-technical friend. It’s been enjoyable and I’m looking forward to sharing them. One is pretty far along and the other is in the brainstorming/design phase. Both of them are on hold awaiting input, assets, feedback, etc. You know, the usual!

While on hold I worked on a long standing to do item for this site (redesigning the footer) as well as a bonus “what the hell!” item (a minimal Style Guide).

When I launched the current version of the site last year I rushed a couple of things at the end, one of them was the footer. The original version was OK, but a bit jumbled, especially on smaller screens.

After using Personal Sites to quickly look at a bunch of different sites I was inspired to knock out a more simplified version.

The changes include…

• Moving to three columns for links
• Removing “Back to top”
• Removing underline from list of links, but leaving underlines in sentences

Initially I was going to get rid of the icons, but I kind of like them, and the new layout addressed what was annoying me about the original layout. I’m going to add the “Back to top” within the content area for posts and project pages, probably as a text link below the “Next” and “Previous” paging, but it’s on the to do list for now.

This was relatively low on my list, but Personal Sites made it so easy to look around that I got inspired to do this one too. It’s minimal for now but I might come back and create a specific template to make it easier to illustrate state-specific things, like the style used for selected text.

It’s coming up on a year since I launched this version of site and I’m going to try to get at least one more thing on the list done before then. Wish me luck!