As you can probably see, I’ve changed the site design slightly after a little bit of design and analysis. Briefly, I’d like to go through the changes I’ve made and, where appropriate, point out why I did the things that I did.

First, I removed the big “NickOhrn.com” text from the top of the page. After looking at that for a while, I figured that it was more in the way than anything else. It was meant as site identification, but if you can’t tell you’re on my site just by looking at my amazing profile picture in the upper left, there, then I think we have bigger problems.

Second, I changed the underlying grid dimensions slightly. It was based on a 960 pixel wide originally, with positioning and layout code of my own design. However, I found a wonderful 960 pixel grid system the other day, and decided to go ahead and rewrite NickOhrn.com to use it for fun. It worked out pretty well, and I’m much more happy with the consistency across browsers now. I will probably be using this grid system for most of my web design work from here on out.

Finally, I change the way that categories and tags are displayed in the footer. They are now each one long list, as opposed to the dual-column display that I had going on before. To me, this seems easier to scan and just looks better.

As always, please let me know what you think of the changes in the comments.

After a long and arduous process, taking a couple of years at the least, I’m happy to finally bring you NickOhrn.com Version 2.0. In this post, I’d like to detail the approach that I took, the reason for the redesign, and what goes on from here.

Why the New Look?

While I enjoyed the look of the old version of this site for quite some time, I always felt slightly uneasy just using s template I grabbed. I like to do things myself and to make them my own. The problem with that was I could never come up with a design that I felt really fit me.

Along with that, I really felt that I had outgrown the bounds of my old post categorization scheme and page structure and some of the posts just didn’t reflect who I was. It was time for some spring cleaning. While I’ve archived the old site, I made soem radical changes now that the new design is up.

Now that I intend on using my blog for more serious purposes, I thought it would be a great time to go ahead and redesign the entire thing. As such, I took it upon myself to sit down for several days and start sketching options. Finally, I hit upon the current look. It is clean and usable, and I love the colors. I think this is really the first design I’ve ever been happy with that I did completely by myself.

Moving Forward

From here on out, I’m going to try to be more regular with my posts. That’s not to say that they will be more frequent, but they’ll come often enough for people to know my blog isn’t dead. I’ll be trying to post longer tutorial style articles now, mostly dealing with programming technologies and techniques. I’ll also be reviewing a lot of the books that I own to help people avoid the ones that aren’t very good.

If you find anything in the design that looks messed up to you, please take a screenshot and send it to me. I’ll take a look and try to fix things up. This design will continue to be tweaked for a short while, but I’m pretty sure its close to being settled as is.

I hope you enjoy the new look and the new style of posts. Please let me know what you think in the comments.