For those of you not reading this on a feed, you’ve probably noticed a significant site revision. The design I created for Critical Games has been growing on me, so I decided to implement it on my main blog. One nice aspect of this is if I ever do switch to an entirely Nucleus setup (or other), the transition will be essentially seamless for the viewer. That’s not any time soon, though, if ever (probably never).

In either case, I like having the uniform design between sites under the Critical Games aegis. Once Gallery 2 hits a stable beta (or better, stable final), I’ll probably look into effective ways to integrate the gallery into the rest of the site (a random image block, for instance, which is a built in module in Gallery 2). There is still some work that needs to be done before the transition is complete, however. (The main page is done, and so is the Credits page, but the rest of the site still needs to be transitioned.) This will be happening over the next several days; I could have plowed through and done it all at once, but I DO have other things I need to be working on.

Features I like about the new design:
1. “Full Entry” link for every post
2. Re-organized datestamp
3. Larger font-size (playing with my new monitor’s higher resolutions made me realize how miniscule my font size was, yet I didn’t like the design with larger type… that’s how this latest design pogrom started, actually).
4. Uniformity between www.criticalgames.com and nadreck.criticalgames.com
5. Refined navigation system (I LIKE menus), allows for a LOT of flexibility in expanding the purvue of the site. I cited in the code and emailed the author, but again, thanks to HTML Dog for the excellent nested menu code. It’s an ingenious solution that I would have never thought of myself.
6. I used it as an excuse to actually make some web stickers (the little “XML blahblah” buttons on the side there). They’re nothing fancy, but they’ll do for my purposes.
7. I like change. Seriously, I get bored with static designs, and the last one (which lasted a good 6 months, mind you) was barely more than a color change from a default layout. If I wanted my website to be cookie cutter, I’d join a blog community. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that… it’s just not for me.)

Next REAL Post: <7 days. I promise.