So here it is, the new design that had been promised for so long, complete with the 2.0 designation .

The previous design irked me a bit, and while it was only a few months old, I decided to try a different design strategy. This new design is designed to fix the annoying bits of the old one.

For this new design, there was an overriding theme that ran throughout the design - 'the content is king'. To achieve this,

•  the site title and menu bar which is traditionally placed at the top of the page has been moved and fixed to the bottom of the window, promoting the content as the first thing the user sees. After all, most of my visitors come here from the search engine anyway, so chances are they've already found what they're looking for, so no point annoying them with menus first up.
• the traditional sidebar has been hidden in popup menus, so the content has as much of the screen as possible. I've always also found the sidebar stuff distracting when trying to read the main content, and hardly read it anyway.
  

Hopefully everyone can still find their way around - it shouldn't be hard, just different.

I also created (read: used Wingdings) a heap of icons (enclosed in yellow warning road signs) to help identify things, plus added a photo background just to add to the experience, and because I think the typical viewer has enough bandwidth. The background image is set to load after the site loads to avoid delays, and is coded to only download the appropriate size - so if you only have a 1024x768 window open, that's the image you'll download, not the 1400x1050 one.

Of course, given Internet Explorer 6 and below (and similar browsers)'s poor graphic and standards support, you won't be seeing much of the difference, although the website will remain readable.

My tumblelog (which integrates my linkblog) is also now completely integrated into the front page, and is also automatically spliced in with my RSS feed.

Navigation has been revamped too, so it shouldn't be so hard to find my contact details as it was before.

You can now also leave your email address behind while submitting a comment, and be notified as new comments are added to a post. This feature is new, and not 100% tested - while it shouldn't spam you, it may or may not work either as I couldn't test it on my test server.

There are a whole lot of small changes here and there too, including an upgrade of the platform behind this site (Community Server 2007 is leaps and bounds better than the old one btw), all designed to make the website more pleasing to the eye and easier to use.

Let me know what you think, positive, negative or otherwise!

Alright, I'm off to sleep - will post a bit more about this new design and the fate of the old design tomorrow. 

P.S. Went and saw The Simpsons Movie today - treat it like an extended episode of The Simpsons and you'll like it, otherwise it was a bit overhyped. The ending sucked too, and where was Skinner and Burns except for those short cut scenes! Do I smell a sequel...