Aral Balkan

As I enter another year on Earth, I thought I'd reward myself with a little birthday present: the luxury of taking a couple of days out to actually design my blog. I think it's about time as I've put it off for about – oh, eight years or so. (This is where I mumble something unintelligible about the footwear of certain young individuals birthed to a cobbler.)

It was really getting to the point where I was ashamed of the blog and thus not posting to it. And my 60,000 or so unique visitors (and you are, all of you unique, don't you forget that) deserved better.

I hope you like the new design. It's running on the excellent Sharpfolio 2 theme by WebRevolutionary.

One note: some of the posts, especially the older ones, may not appear entirely optimized for the new design but it is quite a task to ensure that eight years of content displays correctly when you go pulling the rug from under it by changing the design. I have tried to keep the formatting of existing posts as much as possible and I'm going to continue to tweak the design in the coming days to handle font issues, colors, etc. (I'm not happy with everything yet but I thought I'd put it out there and then evolve it as I go.)

Oh, and finally, I haven't even tested this on Internet Explorer, and nor do I particularly care for it. Just sayin'

Here's to a new year on Earth and a new look for my blog. Hope you like it!

Comments

• Very nice design and congrats with the birthday. It makes reading easy and it's just simplicity.

  by Folkert on 2009-11-15 09:34:10

• Thank you guys again for the kind words :) Eric: having the comments on the right was a conscious design decision. I feel that the importance of comments are almost on par with the importance of the posts themselves and thus their placement which visually equates the two in terms of importance. The site is running on a (rather excellent) theme – like nearly any other Wordpress site out there – however, the "template" as you call it is my design on top of it. See a demo of the original theme to compare (the comments on the original theme, for example, are placed in the traditional spot, under the post.)

  by Aral on 2009-11-15 14:26:44

• The new look works just fine on IE8. Anyone who uses IE and hasn't upgraded to v8 deserves the bad user experience they impose upon themselves. Not sure about such a large font size, but other than that the new look is way better than that weird layout you had before.

  by David Arno on 2009-11-11 14:20:45

• Happy Birthday, Aral! Thank you for being an inspiration, and many happy returns. Snazzy new design - minimal, smooth and very legible.

  by Jack Cole on 2009-11-09 13:35:07

• Thanks, guys – both for the warm birthday wishes and for your comments on the design! :) @gordee: I hear you on the Internet Explorer issue. However, a lot of User Experience is about focus. Do you support everyone with an experience that's the lowest common denominator or do you take a subset of the global audience and give them an exemplarily experience? The difference between, for example Flash Lite trying to support every handset out there and giving users a sub-par experience across billions of handsets to Apple supporting just one handset and giving users a lovely, optimized experienced. A lot of user experience is about focus. That said, I decided to focus my efforts on the 80% of users who visit my blog using Firefox and Safari. I realize that those numbers are very different to a regular consumer web site and that not everyone has the luxury to do that. (And, I did cave in after I wrote that and tested it on Internet Explorer – it has a few formatting issues but, the content is accessible/legible and I may tweak it a little further in the coming days.) @Filip: Thanks, I hadn't noticed the input fields issue since I'm always logged in to my blog and don't see them – testing FAIL! :-) I've fixed this now and the comment field got a little bit more love in the process also :-) @Niels: Thank you, man; that's probably one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me :)

  by Aral on 2009-11-09 13:58:52

• Happy birthday again. I really love the design! Simplicity ;) Enjoy your stay on Earth :)

  by Savvas Malamas on 2009-11-08 15:53:00

• Well, greetins from Brazil. I do read you blog since, huh, I google 'Flash' for the first time. Its quite nice to see the evolution, from the very basics tutorials to the new User Experience age. Congratulations and happy birthday. You've just forgot to say how many summers...

  by Froskie on 2009-11-08 15:54:23

• Ah, I decided to do the same thing to my site - it's in the works right now. Congrats on the refresh. The comments in the right sidebar is really weird - and not very usable. After the post itself I find works best - but that's simply an opinion. Since you're using a template, you should be able to snap those tags around and have it do what you want. Cheerio!

  by Eric Dolecki on 2009-11-14 13:15:04

• Aral - I like the design very much, better than the donkey who didn't really tell me much about design, Flash, the web or user experience. Eyor! Just one thing that bothers me a little - the Internet Explorer comment. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't use IE and don't like it anymore than the next guy, but if your blog states boldly at the top "Welcome to the age of User Experience" don't you have a kind of self appointed responsibility to ensure that the user experience of more than half the users on the net who use IE have as good an experience as those not using it? Just my ha'pennny's worth :)

  by gordee on 2009-11-08 16:05:22

• Congratulations on another year on the third rock from the sun :) Here's to many more! Nice new look; simple and soothing to the eyes! You might want to look into aligning the left side of the input fields of the "Add your comment" block with the textarea though :)

  by Filip H.F. "FiXato" Slagter on 2009-11-08 16:06:03

• Happy birthday. love the new blog design.Design with Simplicity at its best.

  by saumya on 2009-11-08 16:07:02

• Happy Birthday! November's the month ;-) Great work on the blog, you don't just preach it, you DO it. That's what credibility is all about.

  by Niels Muller Larsen on 2009-11-08 23:13:33

• Hey, Congratulations, The site looks really very nice in Firefox, Nice readability. I like the comment area at the sidebar. But some pages get weird where you place the videos http://aralbalkan.com/1784 Great look!

  by KBala on 2009-11-10 17:50:27

• Congratulaitons, with your new blog design and your birthday, which (I agree with Niels) is placed in the month for great birthdays. /bror

  by Bror Arnfast on 2009-11-13 09:19:54