Site theme no longer completely sucks

OK, the site theme no longer completely sucks. I’m using Jim Vanderveen’s modified version of Steam, with my own custom header and the CSS brutally simplified to get rid of margins and excess whitespace.

I’m extremely relieved to have got rid of the default “Kubrick” WP theme.
Fixed-width, heavy whitespace, gratuitous images — what were the WP developers thinking?

(Grrr. Designers who change the browser-default color and decorations for hyperlinks are depriving readers of valuable navigational cues and should be killed in some horrible way.)

I may make some minor changes to improve the look a little over the next few days.

20 comments

  1. I hereby vote Eric Raymond to appear on the next episode of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.
    Who’s with me? ;p

    Face it man, people have different opinion. How things should work / what’s beautiful and what makes sense for you are different than others.
    There’s a reason why designers are designers, and programmers are programmers.

    You are a little bit arrogant and act as if you are the absolute truth.

  2. Whatever font face it’s using right now is much prettier than what was on your old blog, and also much prettier than what is on your web site. It’s a bit *small*, but the face itself is nicer.

  3. A lot of web developers need a good smack on the head, but most of the time the problem is ignorance as opposed to people being just plain obnoxious.
    I think if something like the wordpress theme gets too far up your nose, you can at least turn the stylesheet off. If you were presented with a ’90s style table layout or something you wouldn’t have so much luck, and I still know people who insist upon writing for the web this way.

    *shrug* Things are getting better, at least. :-)

  4. I’ve noticed that designers who have a graphic design background but are unaware of the technical concerns surrounding HTML and browser presentation tend to treat the Web as if it were a brochure. I had to work with one of them once. (Furthermore, she seemed to feel that her position was merely to “design” and it was up to webmonkeys lower on the totem pole to implement the HTML. We got back her designs as PDFs produced from Illustrator.)

  5. (Grrr. Designers who change the browser-default color and decorations for hyperlinks are depriving readers of valuable navigational cues and should be killed in some horrible way.)

    That’s ridiculous. Browser-default colors and decorations can often destroy the flow of a site’s design. When people can tell what is a link and what is not, that’s what matters. In kubrick it’s very easy to see what’s a link and what isn’t. I’ll comment that underlines are much easier to recognize as links than using default colors.

    I agree that a lot of designers take their designs too far and make everything confusing. Safari’s refusal to allow form widgets to be styled much is a very good UI choice by the saf developers. Although I believe they’ve just changed that in their recent updates to WebKit…I digress.

    Joking about killing people for not using design standards isn’t funny. Or intelligent. If you don’t like some design, don’t visit again.

  6. Colors of hyperlinks: Maybe we shouldn’t replace them with some other funky color but remember that information (such as visited and non-visited) should not be conveyed by colors. :)

  7. I think that web pages should have dark backgrounds
    if you read as many blogs as I do… or even write that many … Looking at a white background and black text is a lot like staring into a lightbulb. No really:P think about it… what is the difference between a CRT monitor and a lightbulb other than the fact of colour and it turns off in certain areas and magnets suck the electrons out to the sides:P
    not a poop of a lot that’s what:P when you look @ a computer screen YOU ARE BURNING YOUR RETINAS:D

  8. Hear!Hear! I’ve been running the ugly default for a while now just because I haven’t had the time to fix it. I hate the fixed width layout that is so popular these days. I switch between a 14″ laptop and a 19″ desktop display and want the text to FLOW the way it was meant to be!

  9. In Eric’s world, content would “triumph” completely over style, instead of allowing style to complement content. His website is a good example. It would be much more readable if only it were styled better.
    And I just noticed below: how the f– can something be “proudly powered by”? Oh right. I proudly power my car on regular gas….

  10. Wow!

    Author Sebastian Faulks has revealed he wrote the new James Bond novel,
    Devil May Care, in just six weeks.The British writer, whose books include
    Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, was asked to write a new Bond book last year
    by original author Ian Fleming’s estate.

    Faulks says he adopted Fleming’s work ethic, producing 2,000 words a day
    in a style he calls “about 80% Ian Fleming”.The book will be published on 28
    May next year to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.Earlier this year, Faulks,
    54, said he had initially been reluctant to take on the job, only overcoming his
    fears when he re-read Fleming’s originals.’Light-hearted’In the end, the author
    admitted: “I found writing this light-hearted book more thrilling than I had expected.

    ”I’d spent nearly five years in psychiatric hospitals and medical libraries writing an
    immensely long and difficult book,” he told the Associated Press news
    agency – referring to Human Traces, published in 2005.”It’s possible there are no two
    books in publishing history more dissimilar than Human Traces and Devil May Care.

    A paperback edition comes out next month.

    full article

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