Tuesday is Asymptomatic’s five-year anniversary. I wanted to do something special, so I looked around for someone to redesign the site. Fortunately, I bumped into Becca’s site one day while goofing around with Blog Explosion. I left a comment, and a few weeks later, we’re set to run the new Asymptomatic layout.
I was testing the layout today (possibly not the one you are looking at right now, since I don’t intend to release it until the anniversary), and it looks pretty smooth. Still, as with any massive update like this, there were a few kinks. First, I had to turn the layout into a theme so that I could easily switch over. This was a bit more difficult than you might imagine, since themes use several files (not really required, but I wanted to use them for another reason) to separate different areas of content, and my current theme only uses one file.
Another thing I had to adjust was the CSS slightly. This is weird because the layout looked fine in all of Becca’s samples. But every so often, things on the sidebar (particularly the new Bloglet subscription area and the calendar) would be the wrong height and get cut off. That shouldn’t be.
Adding to the difficulty was all of the special code I’ve added to my WordPress install to get the goofy features that many of you probably take for granted. For instance, the Recent Comments section isn’t something that WordPress ships with. There are also administrative things that you can’t see - like links that let me delete or edit comments directly from the home page - that aren’t standard issue.
I also need to build an additional graphic, since there was a hidden sidebar section that I didn’t point out. When you click on a particular post, a list of related posts appears at the top of the sidebar. Right now, the link is just text, but I’ll fix that up before anniversary day.
I shouldn’t go on like this about the layout because these things have been pretty trivial, and I’m really only cataloguing them for myself than to point them out to you. In all, working with Becca has been very friendly and smooth, and she’s a very talented designer. She’s kept me in the loop the whole way, just like any professional should.
Now… I have to concoct some content worthy of the redesign. Sheesh, this is the tough part.
