the votes are in

Last Friday I asked y’all for your honest feedback about my new design.

I got four wonderfully truthful critiques (I LOVE CRITIQUES) and one very positive thumbs up (I LOVE FLATTERY) on my current, horizontal design.

Here it is for posterity, photographed on my big, spacious designer monitor where it looks really nice if I do say myself:

It also looks super hot on iphones and ipads (I think).  ANYWAY, I am totally one hundred percent convinced that this foray into pushing the boundaries of web design to the limits was a total waste of time.  I’m salivating over a new, sexy, vertical design so much that it’s painful to update this website as is.

I feel the need to defend this design a little bit.  Or myself.  I had just gone to WordCamp and gotten all these new skills that I needed to put into action IMMEDIATELY.  One of them is the little diary photos at the beginning of each Diary Project post and that I never got working right in Internet Explorer (made possible in Firefox, Chrome and Safari by “pseudo elements”; thank you Chris Coiyer, awesome speaker and geeky blogger).  Check them out on the post to the right (or below) but again, not if you’re running IE.

Sara Cannon taught me about responsive web design in which a website actually changes it’s layout depending on the size of the window.  I should make a video for this. OK, fine, here’s a video:

The last design iteration of Jenniferheller.com got painful too.  I’m so sick of looking at those clouds.  And I realized that a sorta ex-friend was referring to the clouds when she was criticizing my “pixelated graphics” the other year.  We all have our axes to grind.

It’s interesting to me how much I love to update this website when I love the design and how much I hate doing it when I don’t.  I tell this to my clients — “When you have a website you love, you love updating it.”

Photo taken August 21st, 2011, before the horizontal scrolling action took over.

It’s so true.  And this is one of the greatest things about WordPress.  You can dramatically alter the look and feel of a website just by flipping a switch.  What’s that?  You’d like to know where you can get a sexy WordPress website?  Check me out over at Artsy Geek.

And now I’m off to develop my new theme on one of my testing ground websites and will go live with it as soon as I’ve tunneled to the bottom of my pile of volunteer and client work. I can hardly wait.

Lets hear from the peanut gallery, eh?

2 thoughts on “the votes are in

  1. new design is very accessible. thumbs up! surfin, surfin, hee ya! (what about links to other hot blogs like lushes in love and nerd on the net?)

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