At work I have just moved to an office in the most extraordinarily eccentric building. It is in fact a number of different buildings that have been knocked together, modified, unmodified, remodified, turned inside out and refurbished countless times over the decades.
It has organically developed so that you have staircases that lead to nowhere. Go down an unfamiliar corridor and there is no telling where you will end up. Sometimes it feels like being in a real life Escher.
Behind the scenes, my website design feels the same.
Every year, at around this time of year, I get an urge to scratch that itch. I have to redesign my website.
Two years ago, when I moved all of my writing to this website, I promised myself I would break that cycle. From then on, I was going to iterate on the one design, and slowly evolve it over time.
However, I have come to realise that redesigning your website is a bit like doing work on your house. You knock walls through, build new ones, cut a few corners here and there. Before you know it, it’s a mess — at least behind the scenes.
A lot of the principles of that 2012 design have been carried over. But what I wanted to do with it a year ago was different to the original vision. What I have tried to do to with it this year has been a great deal more different.
This has resulted in a website design that I am pleased with visually, but in despair about in terms of how it is coded up. For instance, the size of the CSS file has ballooned, probably because I haven’t been diligent enough.
For the sake of my own peace of mind, I will have to rework it at some point. Otherwise if I get that annual redesign itch next year it will be the most painful of experiences unpicking it all.
I took pride in the simplicity of the original design. After a while, though, simplicity begins to feel like starkness. So over time I have sought to jazz it up.
I have written before about how I have found colour difficult to get right in a web design. Once again I have grappled with colour a lot during this redesign.
The main decision I made was to use more colour, and be more relaxed about how I used it. Before, teal (#0080A4) was strictly only used to denote a link (or similar interactive element). I figured that I oughtn’t solely rely on colour to distinguish links. So now I am using more colours in different ways. Hopefully it makes the website more visually appealing.
I have also decided to use circular images in prominent parts of the website. I can’t put my finger on why, but it does look a lot better. However, circular images are everywhere at the moment. So I have probably fallen right into the trap of making a design that will look dated a few years’ time.
The ‘DS’ logo has been redesign as well. It heavily takes inspiration from some recent work by Google Design, who have been creating some visually stunning designs of late. This typeface fit the bill for me as something minimalist yet quirky, and a bit Bauhaus.
But perhaps the biggest difference is in the shapes of the pages themselves, particularly on desktop. I have dispensed with the right-hand positioning of the sidebar. I figured that people really come to read the articles (and analytics data backs that up). So moving the sidebar away can declutter the page and place the focus on the article itself.
I also realised that stuff that anything at the top of the sidebar gets lost in the user’s mind if they have reached the bottom of the article. It makes no sense to have links to related articles, or indeed my contact details, at the top of the page. So I have now moved them to directly underneath the article.
The main disadvantage of this is that it separates the comments section quite far from the article itself. This is in keeping with what a lot of news websites appear to be doing — placing less emphasis on the comments section.
The merits (or otherwise) of what some people call “the bottom half of the internet” are a discussion for another article. I feel like most of the responses I get are now on social media, not in the comments section itself.
But removing the comments section would just feel wrong. The web is all about the democratisation of discussion. It would make no sense to do away with one of the web’s main strengths completely.
No doubt I will revisit the decision this time next year. Here’s hoping I haven’t built the web equivalent of a staircase to nowhere.
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