Redesign in Twenty Oh Nine

So I think this is it. I star­ted this blog some time in 2003, before moving to Blog­ger in 2005, then Word­Press later that spring. In that time I’ve lear­ned a lot about web design, which isn’t to say that I’ve got­ten any good at it. In its current Word­Press incar­na­tion, kbps has gone though ten or more rede­signs, all of which I’ve con­si­de­red pos­ting a kind of retros­pec­tive screenshot tour about. That may hap­pen, howe­ver emba­rras­sing it will be, but in the mean­time I think I’ve struck on something that can last for maybe lon­ger than any of the other designs I’ve crea­ted. Some of them were really abys­mal. But this one is both prac­ti­cal and com­for­ta­ble for me.

The archive pages still need to be cons­truc­ted — tag archi­ves and search results are still pretty use­less, just sho­wing pagi­na­ted post excerpts rather than some navi­ga­ble over­view. The front page needs to be a little more com­prehen­sive than just sho­wing the most recent post. But these things will be addres­sed. For now I have what I think is a robust fra­me­work, so much of which was admit­tedly just an acci­dent of flai­ling around in GIMP.

I know meta-blogging is lame, but kbps began as and mostly still is just a prac­tice ground for web design. In fact in most cases it’s been an obs­tacle to wri­ting due to my not being happy with the way it looks. I’ve been trying to change that for six years, hope­fully I’ve got­ten somewhere.

Things are a little stark at the moment, which I may or may not like, and may or may not solve with some new colors or graphi­cal, tex­tu­ral embe­llish­ments. But the shape of it, I think, is close to ideal. It feels like a load off, any­way. I actually get a lot of Goo­gle traf­fic, and every time I see my stats I cringe a little to know what peo­ple are seeing. But I think I’m okay with this.