Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve heard there’s a thing called “Web 2.0″ and apparently it involves a lot of clever design work. I don’t know or care what exactly it is about “Web 2.0″ that makes it better than, or even different to, the old thing (which presumably was “Web 1.x”), but either way it’s time I made my own WordPress skin for this site. So here is my design, which I’m rather pleased with:

As you can hopefully see, the categories list has been knocked on its side and the archives list has been collapsed into a little menu, accessed by either a category tab or a little tab on the right above the “recent posts” list. (I haven’t decided which yet.) This has rendered the left sidebar totally useless and so that has been removed, the search box having moved to the corner, where the site’s content meets itself, which is all in all I think the best possible spot for it. Also, I’ve lost the Facebook badge and replaced it with a Facebook link in More Of Me. Similarly, the “Meta” column (which has a stupid name, but that’s what WordPress calls it) has been put horizontally under the logo.

I was thinking a lightish grey for the background (where the “links” header is), and white for the main page background. The line down the left hand side that comments and titles go over would either be a narrow line, probably in blue, or the edge of a margin, which also may end up being blue but probably not as Manchester University like a blue bar there and I’m not branding my blog to resemble my employers. I thought the Google Reader and Other Pages ‘tabs’ would be darker than the white Recent Posts tab.

I’ve done no coding at all on this, so I can’t tell you if or when it will go live, and it may have to change depending on what is actually possible, but for the time being, discussion is welcome in the forum thread I made for the purpose. (You won’t need a forum account to post there, but you can’t identify yourself without one, other than by writing your name somewhere within the post.) I’ve disabled comments to keep all the discussion in one place — I’d like to keep the blog comments for comments about the things in the blog and the blog itself rather than code and site design. If you have any comments, please let’s hear them. If anyone voices distaste after I do a redesign and they’ve not mentioned their concerns now then I shall be most annoyed.

Colours would be a good thing to suggest, because if I do them they’ll just end up all being blue again, as that’s all I can do. I’d like to get some pale yellows, and some earthy colours in, because I like the modern look they can give a website. I’d consider some dashed lines, too, as they seem to be popular these days, but other than the margin line on the left, I can’t think where they’d fit in.