I have a new design. If you are in your RSS reader, you’ll want to arrive at the website proper. There are three points I’d like to discuss with you regarding this iteration.

The first is the age number. A long time ago (six years!), when I started my website, the age number represented a design. Each time I came up with a new design I would increment the age. But then with age four I had two designs; you would get one or the other depending on if you visited during the daytime or nighttime. Age five was normal, but for age six I finally made the transition to a large-resolution design. At that time 800×600 was still fairly prevalent and I liked the design for five so much that I kept it around as the low-res version. Age six was also unique because it had five different color schemes (I called them ‘mixes’) which it would randomly select when you arrived. Age seven started out with one design, but I never really liked it (although the colors are great), so after only a few weeks I came up with a cleaner design, calling them ‘Age Seven Spring’ and ‘Age Seven Clean’, respectively. Then when I transitioned from MovableType to WordPress, I finally went to Age Eight, which included a new design. But then I got tired of that design, and WordPress is so flexible, it was simple to just make a new design and leave the whole infrastructure in place. So as my coding/blogging skills have improved, the age number has meant less of a “new design” and more of a “new infrastructure”. For this reason I have put the new design at Age 8.5, since it’s still WordPress underneath, but it has a lot of new design principles and some new code.

The second point is the name. When I originally started my website (it wasn’t a blog then since the term hadn’t been coined yet), my friend suggested the name “as seen through the storm”, since my online persona is stormsilver, and it was a proto-blog. For Age Seven, I renamed it Sporadic Motion, mainly because I would update it sporadically. But then as I grew as a Christian, the name became oddly more appropriate and descriptive of my walk with the Lord. Now as I find my walk becoming more and more steady, I think that the name Continual Growth is a good descriptor. I looked up the difference between “continuous” and “continual” in the dictionary, and as it turns out, “continuous” describes something that has no interruptions, like a line is continuous or the flow from a waterfall is continuous. Continual describes something that happens intermittently, or at intervals, like if it rained every afternoon it would be continual rains because there are breaks. So my growth with God is continual, because I seriously slip and slide backward sometimes.

The third and last point is the design itself. It’s sort of a late-summer/fall theme, which is perfect for the time of year I’m posting this. The tree up top represents the sort of man I hope to be someday, strong like a massive old oak tree. The leaves… well, they just look cool. :) Along the left side, very faintly, is that fire image that I’ve been using since day one. Paragraphs are now justified instead of left-aligned. I’m not sure if this makes reading easier or harder but I like the way it looks.

The left sidebar I’ve split into little sections that you can mouse over and expand. (The neat animation is due to the Yahoo! Interface Library) It’s also fixed so that when you scroll it’s always right there. Now, from a usability standpoint this is one of the most horrible things I could write. It’s not immediately apparent that the sidebar is even there since it has a reduced opacity. It’s also not obvious that you should click on the sections until you move your mouse over one. It’s a wretched waste of space until one of the sections is open. It’s not easy to see things all at once, and it hides information from you that you might need, and might not know is there until you accidentally stumble on it, which you might not. It’s a terrible, terrible thing I’ve done. But! It looks neat, so I’ll probably leave it. It’s a little finicky, but I think I’ve fixed most of the bugs.

Feel free to let me know what you think!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.