New site for 2016

I bought this new domain so…

I had to make a new site. Really, I needed a new site anyway. The last one had little thought put into it and no heart. This one is different.

I like this site, a lot, I think. To be honest, I started with wanting my header content sideways. I just like the way it looks and I wanted that on my site. Everything else just sort of evolved as I wrote the HTML. I tried to design for the content, I tried to design for speed, and I tried to design something that was insteresting enough to click around for a minute. I hope I succeeded at all of those things, but two out of three wouldn’t be so bad.

The three-column layout was sort of an accident. I mean, I did it on purpose but the idea was an accident. I had so much screen and so little content for the menu section, and even moreso when I replaced that with a project or a blog post. Furthermore, I didn’t want a traditional top-level navigation/menu, so it made sense to leave that second column with all the navigational links in plain site at all times.

On desktops I think this creates a cool effect and hopefully there is just enough change to allow users to focus their attention in the right place for a few seconds before needing to move on. I considered giving the “menu” a fixed position but then I remembered I hated menus that just beg you to look at them all the time. I mean, I know how to navigate websites, Menu, OK?

Again, I’m not a designer and along with that comes not being very good at colors. I do love black and white anyway. The Green is #0BBD88 which is a letter+number hex value that sort of translates to my wife’s birthday (02/24/88). I bet she’ll never know that. I made it with numerals at first but it was a blue that I’m sure you’ve seen before. I loved the green, too, because my son’s favorite color is green. Cool!

Anyway, that’s enough design-splaining. tweet at me or something if you love or hate the site. Submit a PR if you hate it and have an idea to make it better.

If you dive a little deeper into the purpose of the site, I invite you to read a few words about it at /purpose.

Written on December 14, 2015