A bit of a redesign
I finally bit the bullet and made some changes to the site's layout. Nothing too drastic, but not minor either.
The biggest change is the new two-column layout on larger screens. Navigation is now on the side instead of the top. For reference, here's the before and after:
I had two main motivations for this:
- More flexible navigation – Having the nav at the top worked fine when there were only a few links, but it was too brittle. On smaller resolutions, it was already spilling onto multiple lines, which looked a bit crap. I realised this was putting me off adding new sections, so it had to go.
- Better readability – I was finding text-heavy pages a little hard to read because the line length was too long. The maximum width is now smaller, which feels easier on the eyes (at least to me).
What both of these have in common is a focus on this site's writing. I love exploring all the gorgeous, elaborate, creative designs NeoCities and the rest of the indieweb have to offer. But the more time I spend working on this site, the more I realise my favourite part is the text. Blog posts, lists, IGTBSAAT ramblings, whatever. I really wanted a layout that would accommodate whatever nonsense I felt like yapping about.
Of course, boredom and the desire to fuck around with CSS instead of going to bed on time is always an extra motivation. It's fun to tinker with that stuff, at least until you've spent three hours fighting with flexbox.
The design I've settled on for now reminds me a bit of old LiveJournal layouts, which I really like. There's definitely still some room for playfulness on individual pages too (like the Lasagna Cat summoning circle) but overall, I think it's a bit cleaner.
There are some other, smaller changes:
- Some items that were previously tucked away in the footer are now in the main nav.
- The footer itself got some extra TLC and now looks fancier.
- Minor changes to the colour scheme. There's more beige now. I kinda like it.
- I got rid of the "back" and "back to top" links as I wasn't sure they were really necessary. (If you found them helpful, let me know! I can bring them back!)
I'm definitely not done with my styling tweaks yet. The homepage layout in particular still needs some work, but I wasn't happy with it before anyway, so I'd rather just get it out the door for now. The CD collection remains an unwieldy beast, even with the now-smaller album covers.
I'd also like to collapse the nav by default on mobile so you don't have to scroll past it every time. Which probably means the introduction of some client-side JavaScript if I'm going to do it in a nice, semantic, progressive enhancement way, but that's a job for Future Me.
Hopefully all this will clear the way for some new sections of the site. I'd like to add a section for reviews or recommendations (about music, books, films, whatever!). Some day, I'll get around to adding a guestbook too. And then eventually, I'll get bored enough to rip it all up and start all over again.