Vandelay Design Gets Re-Designed
Published in Site NewsToday Vandelay Design has a new look! Other than some minor changes, it had been over a year since the blog was re-designed and it was time to give the theme some attention. While this re-design attempted to keep a similar feel, there have been some changes worth pointing out.
For those of you who are reading this post via RSS or email, here are screenshots of the blog front page and of the website home.
One Sidebar Instead of Two
The most significant change is probably the shift from a three-column layout to two columns. The purpose of this change is to allow more space for the content, which will make it possible to include wider images within the posts.
Twitter Link
The new theme includes a link to the Vandelay Design Twitter account that was just set up. I have been using Twitter through my personal account for a while now and I thought it was time to have an account officially for Vandelay Design. If you’re interested in following, you can do so here.
Archives Page Instead of Category Links in Sidebar
The category links in the old sidebar never seemed to be used by very many visitors, so this theme now includes a link to an archives page, but the category links have been eliminated from the sidebar to save space. However, category links are available in the footer now.
Color Scheme
Some of the colors from the old design were kept and some new ones were introduced. The background is now brown as opposed to a dark red.
What Do You Think?
I’m interested to hear what readers think of the new design. Please leave a comment if you have something you would like to say. One other item to point out is that the coding of the WordPress theme was done by WPCoder (more on that in a few days). I designed the theme in Photoshop and decided to outsource the coding to save some time. The parts of the website outside of WordPress (home page, portfolio, services, etc.) were designed and coded in house.
If you notice any dead links or things not working properly, please use the contact form or leave a comment on this post. Thanks.
51 Responses
Congrats Steven. Just love this one. I think the 2 column layout makes more sense than before though the old one was nice too
Looks fabulous Steven! Love it.
I like this new design! I think it works a lot better than the old one.
Congrats on the new design…..
….. but I think the copyright info is missing ?
Love the new design, although I find it strange that you don’t have a link in the main navigation to the blog.
On the homepage for example, the only place I found a link to the blog was in the footer of the page.
Beautiful design and very good location of your advertising.
Thanks Noura. I went with the 3 column approach on the last design because I wanted to get more in the sidebars, but I thought with some re-organization I could get all the essentials in one sidebar and keep it less cluttered. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks Shanna.
Thanks Eric. I think it works better too.
Thanks Paul. I will add that.
Hey Mubs. The reasoning for that is that my visitors tend to fall in two very different categories. First, blog readers. And second, people who are looking for a designer. People in the second category tend to have little interest in the blog (from what I have observed) so I thought it would keep those people focused on what is important to them rather than distracting them with blog posts. I may change that though, it’s something that I debated over.
Thanks Stefan.
Great stuff steven, the background looks rather cool and im liking the big slider on the home page. im always open to change.
I love this one, it’s clear and clean. and the old one looks a little crowd..
Love it! Your content has always been terrific, and this design features it well! Super nice job!
One small flaw. your background color does not match the bottom of your image. Its #2F2419 and needs to be #221B14. I’m seeing a line where the two meet
I love it!!
@Steve: I can see how putting the blog posts on the homepage would have been problematic, a link the header though I don’t see the harm in that.
Hi Steven,
It’s a nice simplistic design, I must say. But I am just wondering if the colour scheme might be a bit too challenging for those who have difficulty reading dark coloured words especially the headings on the footer. I was also expecting a more artistic navigation bar blending with the logo / title
Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong with this redesign.
its great…keep good work going.
looking awsome
great job on the new design.
Love the new design. Very pleasing texture and I’m a fan of the browns and reds (you’ll probably see why on my site, lol). And like MCV pointed out above, changing your background color to hex # he referred to will blend your image with the overall background.
Otherwise, looks great! And I’m a big fan of the homepage slider as well.
Steven, I love this design, man! It’s really clean (with all the ‘pixel-popping’ techniques) and it just makes you want to go through the entire site. I like the background texture too. Aint seen anyone use a cracked earth texture before. Love it. I think the redesign emphasises one of the important principles of web design: there is always room for improvement.
Excellent design, i like it much than the old one, a bigger content column is better, and the color scheme i really clean.
Great redesign!!!
Great redesign ! I really prefer the 2 Columns.
The color scheme is nice. And using just 2 columns is a good idea. I did this about 2 years ago for exactly the same reason
and i’ll stick to it.
The only drawback is, it is still a fixed layout which doesn’t adapt to screen and/or font sizes. I have a good wide-screen monitor. But when i use a sidebar in the browser (sage feed reader) your nice brown background is only visible at the top of your page. And i have a horizontal scroll bar. I can not see very good (somewhat about 20%), so i need large fonts. To make your blog readable for me, i use NoSquint to increase your page to 150%. So the page does no more fit into the viewport. The remainder of the page, that, what fits into the viewport, does not look much different to any average blog (except the header).
But this missing flexibility is the oly drawback i can see
Every a good work! Nice this version. 2 columns is a good idea.
Waho…
Congratulations for this redesign.
Just a thing, it’s a personal point of view but I’m not kind of the red on marron… I found it a little bit hard to read.
But well done for your Photoshop Work !
I like it – it’s always nice to read peoples thoughts about how and why they did certain things on a project.
where’s the old design?
I agree with MCV, the color of the image you are using the background is not matching up with the background color. Other then that it looks good!
ahem.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fvandelaydesign.com%2Fblog%2Fsite-news%2Fvandelay-design-gets-re-designed%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654
Hi Lucasz,
I wasn’t aware of the validation error on the comments, I changed that. Aside from that, the validation errors are coming from the search code from Google and from the Tweetmeme plugin. The other validation error related to the comments is for better accessibility and not yet accepted by all browsers (see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/218054).
Since you’re going to point out other people’s validation errors, you might want to check your own because it doesn’t validate either.
MCV,
Thanks for pointing that out. At the last minute I changed the image a little bit to reduce it’s file size, maybe I changed the color at the bottom without realizing it. I made a change to the bg color of the page, but I’m still seeing a little bit of a line. What I’m seeing is more related to the gradient than the mismatching of colors because it is higher than the bottom of the image by about 100 pixels. I think that can be improved by working with the gradient. If I get a chance today I will experiment with that. Again, thanks for pointing it out.
Siegfried,
I’m sorry that the fixed width presents some issues for you, and I appreciate the feedback. In general I think fixed widths work pretty well and any approach is going to be better accepted by some people than others.
Thanks everyone for your feedback.
I love this new design!
congrats on the new re-design. I like this one over the other one.
The new design looks great – looking forward to future updates.
Right, there will always be someone having some trouble with something
Never mind, just my 2 cents. Although i think, a flexible layout fits better to the web. But i know, there are heavy discussions about that.
Siegfried,
Just to clarify, I wasn’t trying to cast away your situation and say that it is not important to me. I just feel that in the grand scheme of things the fixed width works well. I agree that there are some advantages to a layout that is more flexible. Anyway, I appreciate you reading the blog and taking time to comment.
Very nice, I love the redesign. It seems a lot cleaner.
lookin good!
does not look perfect in ie 6, but not problem.. looks simple but cool.
Thanks Kayla and Liz!
Choen,
Yeah, I didn’t attempt to support IE6. Looking at the stats, such a small percentage of my visitors use IE6 that it wasn’t worth the time to me.
I love the new design, I have followed this site for a while and never posted a comment but the new design is worthy of a comment. Its very clean and smart and certainly provides me with inspiration.
Nice to see you dropped IE6 too!
Very nice and clean, well done!
Congratulations! I like it.
The new design looks very cool and attractive. Its clean and neat!
Good luck!
Looks great man!
Looks great, only thing I’d change is drop down the text size in the footer links down a notch. I know you’re matching the text size in the nav (which I think works fine there) but seems a bit big in the footer IMO. I’d probably change that to a 16px (for the titles) and 12px (for the links) respectively. Looks a bit cleaner IMO.
Congratulation for this redesign, the sidebar is much more clean now !
Real nice, although I noticed, that on the frontpage the navigation at the top is different as the one on the bottom. The “blog”-link is missing.
I just saw, that it has already been commented on that and I second Mubashars opinion. New clients will surely find it interesting to see, that you have a blog where you talk about your trade. It’s also kind of “standard” right now to have a blog.
And, just because I stumbled upon it, I think there is a “d” too much in this sentence: “For churches we offer a feature-rich content management system that makes it easy to maintain and up-to-date and effective website.”
KMB,
Thanks for pointing out my typo, I fixed it. I’m still debating on whether to include the blog link or not, but I appreciate the feedback.
Not sure why I haven’t commented on the new design yet hehe Well I have to say I really like it, definitely an improvement imo – I like that there’s only 1 sidebar now, it breathes more. And seriously, I love the brown and textured background! Great job Steven!
About the blog link on the homepage I’d say go for it and put it in the top nav – I mean, the blog is a huge part of what Vandelay Design is about. Clients may be interested in what you write about. From personal experience, I often send links to some of my own blog posts to clients, often times it helped me land the gig. Just my 2 cents
Hello Steven!
Maybe it is very to late to say that I really love your newest design, because it makes
your navigation a breeze and hassle-free.
Keep up the good work!
I like these designs can be used for my study, thank you Steven.
I love this new design!