Dark Light

Okay, I’ve looked over the comments about the design, so I’ll deal with a few:

Fadin’ away

The fade has gone.
In retrospect, it was probably a mistake.

Personality

This design was originally done for speed of loading, then I added the new corner image, which took away part of that. Part of the reason it doesn’t have boxes or borders was that I don’t like the boxy layout of most weblog sites. It occours that all I did was take away the borders around the boxes, but that does look better.

Curves don’t work on websites, which is irritating yet true. I created wavy lines and non-regular lines around boxes, but I had to use tables around objects for them to render reliably, so I deleted the lines and put a curve at the top. The design I’m currently working one (I spent much of today playing with Paint Shop throwing out design after design) is a lot less straight, quite a bit – though not incredibly majorly – less minimalist, but still retains the firm division between differant texts, because this is logical. However, I have now got to make it in HTML/CSS, subtly convert it to deal with five differant sections obviously, and integrate it with Aquarionics, not a minor undertaking (I downloaded the whole site – minus databases – for my local copy today. Aquarionics is nearly 70mb of stuff, nearly all (minus 100k) publically accessable. Fortunatly the templated design means this won’t be too hard. I hope.

Speed

Aha, the major problem, I think. Minimalism broke out because the people who made the sites were on modems, and wanted dl times to be as quick as possible. With modern, faster systems this is less of a problem, but is the major barrier to a prettier site. I use a page of Aquarionics as my home page, so I want to keep download speeds down purely for selfish reasons. I’m trying to strike a balance between speed and prettiness (The new design will be a little larger, More images, but smaller ones, they almost balance out) but the main thing is that I’m moving away from imagemaps for navigation. I’d love to transform the whole thing into XML too, but I have two and a bit years of diary archives in here as HTML4 (with inconsistant case in tags) so it’s not going to happen just yet.

Fonts

Um… The font at the top isn’t Arial, and that’s the only specified font here, everything else is whatever your browsers default is for sans-serif, which I’m using because I don’t like serif fonts for large blocks of text. Oh, and font sizes in the new design are going to be smaller. Sorry, way of the road and all that.

So, coming later, Aquarionics 3.5, the new design, followed by Aquarionics 4, the great rewrite in something that isn’t 100% PHP But With Added Fun Things (And a rethink of the site, hence the major revision).

Still unemployed and unemployable, still bored. Yay weekend

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