02 Jun 2012

The Flying Developer Simplifies

I don’t touch the layout of this blog very often, but I’ve just made a couple of changes that I thought I’d mention.

First up, I’ve removed the header image. I really liked it but it pushed the actual content of the blog down too far and you had to scroll to actually read anything, particularly on notebook resolutions. It had to go. If you’re interested, the original image can be found on Flickr here: Biggles Biplane

Second, I ditched the sidebar. I wasn’t doing much with it other than providing an archive listing and some outdated links so I moved the widgets I had there to the bottom of the page instead.

Lastly I added a background texture to make the margins a tad more interesting. I find that subtle textures are an easy way to give any webpage a more professional look. SubtlePatterns.com is a great resource for this and their content is free to boot. The particular pattern I’m using right now is called Climpek.

The best part about this is that I did it without changing themes. I’m still using the default Twenty Eleven theme that ships with Wordpress. I’ve considered moving the blog to a lighter framework several times (Jekyll, for example) but WP continues to impress me so I’m staying put for the foreseeable future.

Overall I think that these three small changes put a lot more focus on the content of the blog, which is exactly what I want. If you have ideas or good resources for creating clean, content-centered designs let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 12:00