Well now

I'm close to finishing a redesign of my website now. The old design, frankly, was a bit 90's; black background, white text. The only things that really redeemed it was the lack of green, and the html5 header...

In any case, the whole things undergone a complete redesign, from the ground up. The background is now white/very light grey, with dark grey text, and the whole thing is centred. I've also used a couple of new technologies whilst redesigning it and they both proved pretty simple to use.

First up is JQuery. This is a relatively small/big (depending upon what you judge it against) Javascript library with a LOT of functionality. It provides animation effects for the DOM of the page, as well as easy wrappers for AJAX calls, which have proved to be especially useful. I've redesigned the way content is displayed as well; instead of each link going to its own page, an JQuery now loads each content page into the main one using AJAX, then provides a nice animation to slide it in.

The second technology isint really a technology as such; more a way of simplifying columns in a webpage. Its called "The Square Grid" and it provides an easy interface for creating columns on a page, in multiples of 14 pixels.

Together theese two toolkits have saved me a LOT of work. The homepage has gone from 349 lines of HTML and javascript to just 75.

As for the rest of the site, I plan to slowly migrate the rest of the content across over the coming weeks, and hopefully get some new stuff up as well...