MrQwest

The previous incarnation of my site launched almost a year ago (February 2011) and even though I felt it was a huge improvement over the design it replaced, it soon felt restrictive in what I could do and what I wanted to do. Because of this feeling, I didn’t really enjoy writing much as I felt the articles and the content itself didn’t feel right to read.

I couldn’t pin-point what was causing this anxious feeling so as each month went by, I tweaked something or changed a layout. Played with the typography, colours and tried to change the feel of the site but none of it worked.

The underlying grid system and the way I had designed it made everything feel cramped and tight. The code wasn’t optimised for responsive layouts or multiple devices as it used a fixed width grid system. I had every intention of retro-fitting it using media queries but it seemed like a waste of time to spend trying to fix a design I no longer enjoyed.

I toyed with the idea of redesigning around August time but thought I’d do it locally in my development environment and then push it live when it was ready… but that never happened.

So today, I’m changing it. I’m publicly redesigning and re-aligning this site. I’ve learnt a lot since I last redesigned and I want to put all that to the test!

I’m going to strip this site of all style and start from scratch using my own content as the basis. I’m working from the content out. I know what needs to be there, I know what sort of content I’ll be posting and I know how I want it displayed. No lorum ipsum filler text to ‘make-do’ whilst I play around.

I know I want it to work across devices so will be using percentages for layout and ems for type.

And also doing it this way, I can blog about my decisions… and I can also take my time on the details rather than rushing trying to ship an ‘ok’ design.

I’m hoping this’ll be a fun journey, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it too! Feel free to chip in with any comments or suggestions :)