Design

This site's design is quite different from anything else I've done.

Goal: minimalistic design.

I wanted this site to avoid unnecessarily decorative graphics and design elements (although I did want to leave in enough to make it at least marginally appealing!). You might think of the current design as "too texty" or "bland," but consider why I'm doing this:

• Plain sites are easier to modify. I'm lazy. If I have to make a new image (or worse, modify existing images) in order to add an area to my site, I probably won't do it -- I'll shove the content somewhere else or not add it at all.

• Plain sites download faster. I did my time on slow modems; I know what it's like to download a page with gobs of big graphics that the designer thinks are pretty.

• Plain sites don't get tiring as quickly. I've made plenty of designs that were filled with pretty pictures -- but I got tired of them after awhile, and then they were just visual clutter, so I put in some new pretty pictures ... and then those became dull ...

• Plain sites can be easier to read because there is much less to compete for your eyes' visual attention. They also scale a lot better -- go ahead, bump up the text zoom level in your browser and see what happens.

Goal: simple, standards-compliant code.

Many of my past designs have had a lot of nested tables, <font> tags, and other embarassments. I wanted this design to be clean "under the hood" as well as on the surface. You can read more about this in my Web Standards spiel.

I have fallen short of this goal -- not all semantic elements are encoded as such, my character encoding isn't perfect, and I still have two tables in this layout. It is, however, a far cry from the poor coding styles I've been guilty of in the past.

Thanks

My friend Jessica Marple (see Jessica's home page), a professional graphic designer, spent a lot of time giving me helpful feedback and thoughtful suggestions on this design's look. She was patient through several revisions, and this page wouldn't have looked nearly as nice without her advice. Thanks, Jessica!