Site Design is Fun

After 6 hours of sleep, I awoke thinking about changing the site design and flow of information. I could not force myself back to a state of slumber until I had put these ideas down for a potential site refresh.

Last week, I added a hero image on the index.html. It's a picture I traced and coloured as vector art. The transparent gradient overlay and resizing title and tagline are all done in CSS. The navigation nav-title and nav-links are now spanning the full width of the viewport (or users browser window).

theonlyblogever - March 2026

It's based after that 2010's era full-width wordpress blog style. Something to trial and see how it looks: more visual, less minimal. I enjoy hacking and changing the site to see how it all looks. I read about and consider the placement of different elements: colours, graphics, links and sections. I try and keep the site efficient and the code easy to understand and modify. As Dave Rupert says, "...exposes some insecurity I have, but I couldn't shake the idea...". This recent design change lasted all of 3 days.

theonlyblogever - April 2026

Of course, I like these design concepts. We've turned the site into a slightly classic, brutalist, newspaper-like design. The .css has been refreshed. Fonts have been kerned and weighted. A new CSS box layout is being tested with redesigned headers and footers. Also, almost everything is left aligned for simplicity.

We've kept my love for black backgrounds and white text with green accents, that aesthetic has been around since 2003, when I made my first tripod site. Behold,

brendanscoolwebsite - September 2004

Lost to time are other blogger sites over the years.

Blogger.com homepage - February 2005

I was always in awe of people who do front-end web design professionally. I always struggled to find reasons to write and produce content. I lacked confidence in my own ability. Now, I'm enjoying the process often. And, I am going to continue writing and designing. Authoring text and rendering the text in a browser is still magical to me.

Brendan's Technical Blog - January 2025

theonlyblogever - March 2025

The screenshots here are only a portion of the changes I’ve tested and tried. Having my entire live site available on my local machine means that changes can be viewed instantly.

I’ve really enjoyed updating my skills by trying different stylistic elements. This site will continue to evolve as I grow and change. I hope to continue writing posts that I would want to read.