jamie goode's wine blog: A new look for wineanorak

Thursday, December 17, 2009

A new look for wineanorak

I've been working for a while on changing the look of wineanorak. The old design had been tweaked a little, but wasn't much changed since the launch of the site proper in early 2000 (although a previous version of the site, as a sort of hobby page, dated back to internet pre-history - 1997). The new design isn't set in stone yet, but I've tried to follow research on how people actually use sites, without using too many snazzy navigational menus. I've also tried to make the site compatible with all browsers (did you know ie6 is still the most widely used?), and I've therefore avoided using the otherwise elegant css for designing the pages. Using tables for design will no doubt upset web designers on quite a deep level.

I've also thought quite a bit about bringing the blog and website together more closely. But I've decided against it. You just couldn't do the same sort of in-depth articles as blog posts, so the division will remain. Also, blogs are hard to navigate through after the event. A few weeks after posting, it becomes tricky for readers to navigate all the way through a blog. So I've kept the two running in parallel.

What do you think?

18 Comments:

At 9:17 PM, Blogger Nick Oakley said...

what design programme are you running? This is presumably NOT the old FTP upload of htm documents.

I found squarespace.com to be very user friendly. There is no doubt that the shelf life of the web designer is going to be limited given the ease with which the enthusiastic amateur can create very sharp looking websites these days.

 
At 10:05 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks great

 
At 11:37 PM, Anonymous Charles205xs said...

SO much better than the old one. Much easier on the eye. Well done!

 
At 12:32 AM, OpenID Richard said...

Really like it Jamie!

 
At 8:26 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Much better - on the old site new longer articles not on the blog were difficult to identify. Much easier with the parallel listing

 
At 9:19 AM, Blogger Jamie said...

Thanks for your nice comments

Nick, I do it using frontpage (please don't tell any web designers - they hate this program for its messy html) and then upload it by ftp, the good old fashioned way

 
At 9:37 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks nice, yes!

Mark

 
At 10:54 AM, Blogger Jamie C said...

Hi Jamie, the website looks great. I'm a web designer, but don't worry I won't chastise you for using Frontpage (whatever works for you!).

On the point of IE6 market share, it is true a lot of people do still use it but different audiences have browsers - have you checked your analytic to see what browser your readers use?

On a recent site I designed, less than 8% used IE6 so I went to town :)

 
At 3:17 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jamie,

The simplicity of your current blog set-up is on of the things (one of them) that keeps me coming back. I'd encourage you to keep the new design as straight forward and elegant.

Graham

 
At 4:26 PM, Anonymous Sarah said...

Jamie - Looks like a lot of work but to great effect - less clutter is definitely something that encourages me to visit a site - look forward to celebrating a decade of wineanorak in 2010!

 
At 6:54 PM, Anonymous Tim Carlisle said...

Like the new site lots - you could probably integrate the blog within your main site as a separate area to articles using something like Joomla - a pretty useful bit of kit. It allows you to write "articles" and "blog posts" as standard although a bit of tweaking it required to get things to work how you want them to.
It's also very good from a search engine perspective - but it may be a step too far?

 
At 8:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Btw, Jamie, you do need to check the spelling of the adjective for Argentina :-)

Mark

 
At 8:35 PM, Anonymous Alex Lake said...

Nice. Quite classic. Not so keen on the WA background. Agreed on separation of blog and main site.

 
At 11:02 PM, Blogger Chris Kissack said...

Nice work Jamie, but you might need to check your own webstats. On Winedoctor IE6 lags behind IE7, IE8, Firefox and other Mozilla/Gecko based browsers.

 
At 5:34 PM, Blogger Madame said...

Liking it - alot

 
At 5:35 PM, Blogger Madame said...

Liking it - a lot. Easy to navigate around the oodles of information you have on the site.

 
At 5:36 PM, Blogger Madame said...

Liking it - alot

 
At 12:02 PM, Blogger Jem said...

Would be useful to link direct through to indivdual blog articles you mention in the one liners on the front page rather than having to scroll down the blog

 

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