Rebooted

First of all I want to apologize. This wasn’t really planed and this design basically happened yesterday and the night before yesterday. But more about this later.

First of all, what is new:

  • Well, as you can see zerokspot.com has become quite dark. I was heavily inspired by various sites include discoapp.com to finally try a dark/near-black design.
  • The sidebar is now basically optional and can be toggled using the “Sidebar” link in the menubar. This only works (and the links only appears) when you JavaScript enabled.

  • Simpler: The whole markup is way simpler constructed compared to v3. The main motivation behind this was, that I also want to use this design for other subpages of zerokspot and want to spare me some pain of porting an over-complicated markup structure to a different and probably less flexible application than Drupal.
  • jQuery: All the custom JavaScript is now done using the fabulous jQuery framework. There might be some bugs here and there esp. when it comes to some compatibility issues with the JavaScripts used by Drupal, but I guess this will all go away when Drupal 5.0 finally lands :)
  • On every page the visitor will see right away, that this site is a personal website. While this might be the über-feature, when browsing the web knowing right away who was behind a page became very important to me. In the future I also want to add the hCard microformat in this little box.

OK, that’s for the new part. Now to the part where I explain how this happened:

I read an article on 37signals.com and loved on of the screenshots in it. So the first version of this design was still with a white background. Then on Monday afternoon I added the hidable menubar. I think I also bought a Disco license on that day and visited discoapp.com quite a lot during that time. This seems to have influenced me enough to change some parameters in the stylesheet and voilà, there was the black design.

Again, this happened all after I had written that I won’t participate in this Reboot. Back then the design draft looked totally different ;-)

Anyway, I hope you like it :)