Getting some new blog clothes – seattleduck puts on some K2!

There is a low-level rumbling in the blogosphere that web design is increasingly irrelevant as content consumption shifts to RSS.

Horsepucky, I say. A well designed and good looking site say volumes and provide insight, through About pages, links, asides, and more, that a straight content feed can’t. The design, and added depth of the site, round out the character for the reader, even if 90%+ of the reading goes on via an RSS feed.

In that spirit, I’ve long been playing with a new look and feel for my blog site. The original version was a stock Typepad layout (with a flat green banner…woohoo!), then Wordpress happened and I shifted to the 3-column version of the Relaxation theme. Good looking, but the design imposed limitations on where I could take the site – the header image didn’t lend itself to the clean addition of a nav bar, the two columns to the right got busy fast, the shading for the sidebar wasn’t done with CSS but rather an underlying, vertical repeat image, which made it very hard to modify from page to page, etc.

So recently I switched my family photoblog over to the Falling Leaves theme, and spent gobs of time integrating and tweaking a Gallery2 with WPG2 plugin. Looks awesome, but again, too much code and stylesheet tweaking needed to do anything fancy.

So here we go, with a beta version of the impressive new K2 "modification" from the original designers of Kubrick. I dropped in a cool background tiled image (link in a previous post) and a free stock header photo (credit for both to be added to the site this weekend). Did some CSS modifications following the tips by Matthew Stinson. Then got fancy with my "Subscribe" RSS buttons (orange seemed so…70s) thanks to the Brilliant Button Maker site.

What’s next?

• FlickrRSS Plugin fix – for the life of me, I can’t get the cache path to work right. So I disabled it to help the site load faster, for now.
• FAlbum Flickr plugin – hopefully within the next two weeks
• Plugin-used plugin – because it seems cool
• Sidebar modification on my About page – need to figure out how to tweak the K2 sidebar.php for items that only show up on the About page. Looking to inlcude info about this site, contact info, and some social network links.
• Links page – creating a standalone version shortly, using a plugin or two, or just dropping the WP function on there.
• Footer fix – kinda ugly down there

In any case, enjoy my little Web playground! For those of you who only subscribe to the RSS feed, I’ll try to keep up some interested styuff there as well. Lots of viral and campus marketing-related posts brewing about in my head.