Design update

Oct 19

Website Updates David No Comments
captcha, contact, retaggr, theme, wordpress

Approximate reading time is

Have been mulling over a few design features.

First of all, the footer; The footer originally only had information about the theme. I added a creative commons licence and a XFN compliance link. Although today I tried taking those plus a couple of other chicklets and putting them in the sidebar. Looked okay, but also looked like sports-wear with logo’s spattered all over it. So, they’ve gone back into the footer and are aptly headed with “The Small Print!“.

The search widget was broken, because the header was incorrectly placed, I’ve now fixed this.

I’ve removed the “Recent posts” sidebar widget. My reasoning was you’re looking at the damn thing, you can see what was recent! In it’s place I’ve put a Twitter widget. Only showing the latest post, just as a sign that I’m alive and to catch reader’s attention.

Finally the contact page. I had three candidates posted. The first was a manually written list of all my profiles, I was manually linking the favicons and site names. The second was a widget from Retaggr, which also did the same thing, but automated (thus giving me the Retaggr site as a profile management tool). The final candidate was an embedded copy of my Retaggr card.

Most of the feedback went for the second candidate. I am always highly grateful of feedback and I will abide by it 99% of the time. Although this time was that 1%, therefore I would like to give my reasons.

I wanted to embed Retaggr code for two reasons:
1. It provides an e-mail me link which is CAPTCHA protected.
2. It provides an automated way of presenting all the sites I use.
I wanted something clean and simple (which I think you’d all agree with).
The Retaggr widget profile links didn’t link to the indicated sites, instead they launched a copy of my card, most of the time saying something like “Retaggr doesn’t yet have a widget for this site”.
Given the choice I didn’t want to maintain the manual list. This was despite that it provided page that functioned as you’d expect the Retaggr widget to (merely on first sight).

The only disadvantage with the embedded card is that it’s bright white, and doesn’t blend in with the site.