Web Site Redesign

I spent yesterday playing around with possible layouts for a website redesign. One thing that seems to be tricky is figuring out how wide to make it. My old site seems awfully narrow on my current wide laptop screen, but it was based on the recommended parameters at the time. These days, do too many people not have widescreen format displays? If you design for the old-style monitor, there's so much space to the side and then to have any content you either need a lot of pages or require a lot of scrolling. Then there's the fact that the content seems to float in the middle of a blank screen, unless you design it so there's a colored background that stretches the width of the window, with the content in a different color in the middle. I actually find that rather distracting. I've done a test site where I don't bother with that, just keep it all white and have lots of white space and maybe do some color blocks to anchor the content, and I rather like that. It's also so much easier to work with. Then again, I'm the kind of person who finds lots of white space soothing. I can live happily with blank white walls. Other people might find that dull.

Then I realized that there's not much point in completely redoing the site until I can include the new book cover and info, but I can do the general master layout and do a lot of the pages. I think I'll mostly carry over the content from the old site, with some tweaks and updates and in a new format, but is there anything you'd like to see on my web site that isn't there? I mean, other than the complete content of the next book. Sorry. You'll have to buy that.

Meanwhile, I've really fallen behind in my housework. It's not to the point where I'd have to spend a day in panicked cleaning if I found out someone might come over, but it is getting a little messy and I've missed all my chores this week. I may play catch-up today.

And after shopping for a birthday card for my dad this morning and ending up buying a rather generic one, I'm back to wanting those greeting cards for geeks. Most of the funny cards were not the sort of thing you can give your father. Otherwise, they were really tacky or rather gross about the effects of aging or were about beer, scotch or golf, none of which my dad is into. My dad dragged me to see Star Wars, the first two Star Trek movies and Raiders of the Lost Ark (seeing all of those was his idea). He's more about church than about beer and scotch. There just weren't many funny cards that weren't about "ha, you're getting old" or about getting drunk. From the selection of cards, you'd think jerks were the only people buying greeting cards, and that seems counterintuitive.