After three and a half years, it’s about time for another redesign. Welcome to goer.org 4.0 — now with fewer features!

For comparison and amusement, the previous three revisions are preserved in amber here:

• goer.org 1.0 (2000-2003): Look at those elegant rounded corners! Clearly a site way ahead of its time.
• goer.org 2.0 (2003-2006): We’ve made the jump from a table-based layout to an all CSS version. It turned out… awfully boxy and green. Although to be fair, I believe this layout actually worked in Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4.
• goer.org 3.0 (2007-2010): Goodbye green, hello brown! This was my first attempt at a YUI Grids based layout.

I was satisfied with version 3.0 at the time, but over the last couple of years, I became more and more unhappy with the site. Not only did it still look amateurish, it was way too hard to read. But a major overhaul seemed daunting, and I wasn’t quite sure how to fix it in the first place.

An Epiphany

Then I downloaded Safari 5, which comes with the famous Readability plugin built in, and tried it out on a couple of popular news sites. The effect of seeing the article without all the extra navigational crap was startling, and it jolted me into taking a hard look at my own site.

• Why bother listing recent posts next to every entry? Especially since the posts aren’t necessarily so recent?
• Why show the blogroll next to every entry? Giving a nod to friends and family is nice, but do all those links need to be there every time?
• Why show my Delicious linkroll next to every entry? Is there a reason that Javascript needs to be loaded for every entry?
• Why is the Creative Commons section so huge?
• Does the site really need a site-specific search box? (Oops, it’s broken anyway.)

It occurred to me that just because blogs traditionally have linkrolls and tag clouds and thirty different “sharing” buttons and blog ads and God knows what else in the sidebar, doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be.

Now inspired, I read up a little on typography for the first time, well, ever. And the good news is that some of the principles of good typography are so simple that even knucklehead non-designers like myself can understand them. For instance, I had always believed that websites should let the main content area flow as wide as the user wanted. If the user wanted a narrower or wider view, they could just stretch their browser window. Oh sure, some websites force a particular column width — websites run by The Man! Why not be freaky and free?

However, now I realize that there is in fact an optimal range of width for English text. That’s why paperbacks are as wide as they are. That’s why newspapers and magazines have columns. And that’s why this site now uses a fixed width layout. If you don’t like it, take it up with the Commandant.

So What’s Changed?

A bunch of things:

• As mentioned above, the sidebar is completely gone. All the stuff that was there has been either A) miniaturized or B) moved to a separate dedicated page.
• Although the layout of the new site is actually much simpler, there are many changes to typography and general look-and-feel. The overall look I was going for was “book-like”.
• The banner at the top has been refined. The images are larger, and I’ve eliminated a couple of the picture frames. The site’s color scheme still derives from the images (browns and other warm shades).
• The comment form has been revamped according to the guidelines in Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design. That process might be worth a post all by itself.
• The backend is still Movable Type, but upgraded from MT3 to MT5. I put a lot of thought into other options: staying on MT3 forever, migrating to WordPress, and even (briefly) rolling my own system. That process might be worth a separate post as well.
• A number of performance improvements thanks to the slimmer design and some help from YSlow. Page weight is smaller, fewer HTTP requests, static assets have far-future Expires headers, etc. Most pages now fully load in subsecond time.
• Finally, the site has migrated from HTML 4.01 Strict to HTML 5. Not that I’m using any major HTML 5 features yet, but I do like me that HTML 5 doctype.

Credits

This redesign probably would not have been possible without:

• The engineers who support YSlow.
• Luke Wroblewski, for writing Web Form Design.
• The Yahoo! Search design team. I’m not a designer by any means, and my visual thinking is pretty weak. But thanks to being around some really talented people the last couple of years, I’ve managed to pick up a few tricks by osmosis. Remember, it’s not that the bear dances well, it’s that he dances at all.
• My wife Sarah, who has a much keener eye for color and layout than I do, and can spot something that’s a pixel out of line without even straining.

And that’s about it! Here’s looking forward to goer.org 5.0, coming in 2014 to a browser near you.