blogONE

A while ago I began using the sandONE theme, a customized rendition of Robert Ellis’ “Takimata” based on Plaintxt’s Sandbox framework. You may remember the original having a hell-load amount of whitespace which most likely burnt your retinas to the core (or made a great light source in a dark lecture room). In comparison, the refresher doesn’t have much variation in terms of colours, but it definitely makes better use of browser space and has subsequently decreased the amount of whitespace. A more in-depth analysis in the full post! *yawn*

One major comment/complaint brought up by visitors was confusion on how to navigate the site, since the 3 most important pages on my blog (About, Media and Comics) were beside one another directly under the blog title. I semi-expected visitors to be curious and move their mouse around, but I should definitely be chided in my thinking, as visitors most likely don’t give a mad shit about curiousity with text. Subsequently, most visitors thought I wrote a broken-English description of the blog (ie. “BlogONE: About media comics”).

Therefore the header had been increased to full page width (relatively), with the “title-navigation” separate from the blog-title. Some sort of signal (ie. _) was also required to be in front of each link, so that people would no longer be under the impression I’m trying to make a broken sentence IN ALL CAPS.

The actual blog description was originally in a dark grey variant (ie. #444), which obviously did not show well on black AND white. The remedy was to keep with my actual blog colour-scheme and have the text pink, partnered with a black background. Unexpectedly (and pleasantly), the resulting result resulted…with results. I have mixed feelings toward the differing background colours for pages and archives, and I’m still trying to fix my footer such that I can expand it, but I believe this is a good first-step in refreshing a theme which began with flaws.

And of course, the blog remains 100% render-able in Gecko-based browsers (ie. Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, etc.), as well as Chrome…but looks semi-horrible in IE. But nobody develops for just IE anyway, those blokes.

Do you have any suggestions to further improve the theme? Are there any issues you’ve noticed? Bugs? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do!