Angry in the Great White North

The theme of this redesign is consolidation and simplification. I've studied traffic data from the last few months, including how people interacted with the site, and made a series of changes both is response to way people are using the site, and how I think they would like to use the site.

First, the banner. A bit less imposing than the previous one, using a lighter font and weight. As with everything artistic, the results would throw a graphic designer into catatonic shock, but it's the best I can manage. I've moved the "Angry Beaver" inside of the (now defined) boundary of the banner to help unify the logo with the name.

The top level tabs are gone. Don't make the mistake of thinking I don't like tabs. I think they are a great navigation tool. But the fact is, a blog is not a site that requires a lot of navigation. From the index page to the post page via the permalink, and 98% of the user base is covered. Visitors to a site like Amazon engage in a lot of complex navigation and so require well thought out navigation aids. For a blog though, a few permanent links in a footer is fine for the few people looking for these auxiliary pages. To compensate though, I've moved the monthly archive link list to the a permanent home on all pages on the right rail.

The Blogging Tories get a rail all to their own -- a testament to the size of that blogroll.

With everything else moving to the inner right rail, I had to review all the gadgets and gizmos and decide what would remain and what wouldn't. Again, studying traffic data allowed me to decide which toys lived up to the promise of driving scads of traffic to my site. None did so out they went. That should not be taken as a criticism of these tools. The lack of traffic is just a likely to have to do with the blog. An Amercian blog about teen entertainment news might get a lot of mileage from a gadget that puts up the faces of recent visitors, but a Canadian blog focusing on politics doesn't seem to draw a lot from this sort of eye candy.

The underlying DIV structure is much more rational now. Besides being more efficient, it also gave me an opportunity to hone the site for presentation on mobile browsers, especially those that don't process CSS. Before it was not bad, but now it looks even better, with no fragmented image slices hurting the user experience.

The critical elements of the site are accessible on a browser set for a width of 800 pixels. One in six web surfers use monitors that can't go to a higher resolution than 800x600, so people managing websites need to remember that boundary if they want to maximize accessibility.

The lighter look also results in faster download times. The home page used to take 60 seconds or so to download on a 56k dialup connection. Now it measures a mere 20 seconds. For now that means speedier visits, obviously, but it also means I can consider adding new features to try out, if any catch my eye, since I've got some latitude with download time. But I'm in no rush to do that. For now, I want to refine the new look of the site, gather some feedback, and plan for the next redesign.

Update: Two changes:

1. The problem with the shifting right-rails was only partially resolved. It should now work for all pages.
2. When I first redesigned the banner, I was playing on the colour white purely as a name for a colour. But the emphasis I put on the word "white" made me wonder if the blog would be seen as some sort of white supremacist site. Was I being paranoid? When one of my long-time readers made the same observation via email, I knew that I had hit the wrong note. So I shifted to altering the colour of the word "white" to white, and nothing more than that. It now alternates with "great" and "north". The emphasis has been moved to the word "angry". I feel more comfortable with that banner.