We just launched a our new site and are very excited about its design. Our previous site was merely a static HTML landing page that linked to our shared and personal blogs.
The new site accomplishes several key goals:
- Host our blog
- Allow us to “market” our design/custom app dev servers
- Do this all with a clean, readable, professional design with a special focus on the ability to show off some photography
WordPress provides us with a platform that can handle these tasks with ease. We opted for a static front page and created a custom theme (based of the default theme code). While there are still a few rough edges in the theme (don’t look to hard at the single post pages!) we are quite proud of how it meets our needs.
The design is still evolving a bit, being tested against several concrete goals
- Looking great both on a 1024×768 screen and a 1680×1050 screen and everything between
- Being readable: clear text and no distractions
- As mentioned above, being able to attractively display photography in the blog
The biggest challenge was creating a design that effectively utilizes large, widescreen displays while still looking natural on smaller displays. We ended up using a elastic center column with a fixed max-width next to a static right sidebar. That combined with a little bit of dynamic resizing of content (using jquery) seems to quite effectively acomplish this goal.
Being readable isn’t as hard. Black 14px Helvetica in a 20px “soft” grid with Palatino headers on white is a fairly safe bet. The 20px grid (it is soft, because I don’t worry about it in the header or footer) gives the main content and sidebar a consistent feeling rhythm. The only issue that we have is that the site does get a little wider than ideal for easy reading when displayed on widescreen monitors. We are experimenting with some ideas to address this.
Finally, displaying photography. By keeping the design of the site open and wide we leave plenty of space for photos in the blog. Really, the entire feel of the site makes this a non-issue.
Do let us know what you think and let us know if you encounter any weirdness in the site layout!