Helvensteijn.com

Oh yeah, it took some longer than I expected, but here it is: Helvensteijn.com v4!

As the version number suggests, this is the fourth design of this web site since I started using WordPress almost three years ago. Personally, I think it looks somewhat more sophisticated than the previous ones. If you look at the screenshots below, you’ll see my point.

I had the intention to redesign this site for a while already, when I stumbled upon an existing WordPress theme called Mystique. It has some nice touches, especially the checkerboard-over-rainbow thing. Obviously, my design is inspired by Mystique, but not based on it. I built it from the ground¹ up, and gave my own swing on pretty much everything.

As I blogged about earlier, I no longer care about invalid CSS, so I didn’t hesitate to apply what I call progressive enhancements all over the place. Rounded corners, translucency, box and text shadows, that’s all CSS. That’s why this web site is best viewed in a modern browser, preferably one that’s not made by Microsoft. While I do support IE7 (which has some cosmetic issues I haven’t found a solution for yet) and IE8, the latest version of a more standards-compliant browser will give you the best experience. Folks using IE6 or even older are plain out of luck, they get served a very basic stylesheet, similar to what you would get if you were to print a page.

I also added some little extra’s for folks with JavaScript enabled. Not only the font size can be adjusted, you can pick a few different color schemes as well. It is also possible to turn off (and back on) animations². Some people like them, others don’t, so I left the choice to you. These options can be found in the top right corner, no matter how far you’re scrolled down. Just hover your mouse over the little “preferences” box to bring them up. In addition, sidebar widgets are collapsible, which could be useful especially for the archives widget which is already quite long. All these preferences are saved in cookies.

Which brings me to yet another extra: the Twitter thing in the header. I have your browser fetching my latest tweet from Twitter on each page load. I’ll probably have to look into caching that in a cookie for an hour or so, but I had to so something with all that empty space.

I don’t think this design is complete or finished. My designs never are, especially when just launched. Numerous tweaks and enhancements will probably be added in the near future. Consider this design beta.

Last but not least, here are some screenshots of the previous designs to compare with:

First design

Second design

Third design

Update (March 18th, 2010)

Made a rather major tweak. Found a nice font a few days ago, and decided to use it for the titles all over this site. It’s called Museo, made by Jos Buivenga.

1. The ground being a “blank” theme made by Chris Coyier
2. Except for the lightbox animations; once initialized, they cannot be dynamically toggled