the blog was just released a few days ago and already i’m getting a huge response from teachers, friends, etc. so thanks for that. i’m quite surprised to know that my teachers, the ones who have taught and guided me in this industry, are bookmarking my blog to read about my ramblings and discoveries and other random stuff. before being a student at the art institute of san diego, i used to do my layouts with tables and heavy sliced-up images, so being able to code something like this where the blog’s design is 90% based on the css and that it can fluidly adjust to a person’s browser window using just css is definitely a huge step up, and that’s definitely thanks to the teachers.
the blog’s css is still getting some major changes and tweaks to the positioning of things and styling of things, including the search bar you see to your right. the text to your left might get a little revision or two and the comments form definitely needs some work. i’m probably adding a few more graphical elements to the layout too, thanks to the advice from designer friend rachel dulos. check out her work. she has a pretty cool blog too. awesome illustrator, that one. she does freelance and i hate doing intensive illustrator work, so someone hire her instead.
i saw this from the very beginning, that the design would be a controversial one. people either loved the layout and hated the colors or vice versa, loving the colors and hating the layout. many of you loved both with the traditional web 2.0 stripes and information design and some of you only loved everything to an extent. it’s not my usual style, i know. it was more of a seizure thing, the colors. but that is not where the name panicstarter came from. it was actually from another project, something a bit more malicious, that never found it’s way out of my harddrive. but i’m taking all of your comments and suggestions with stride and am listening to all of it. as a humble and respected designer, i pay my respects back to everyone else. i’m building this blog for you guys and want to make sure that you experience what you want to see, not what i think looks good. you’ll just have to bear with me and my schedule, but it shouldn’t be too long now.
but as far as everything else, i think i’m quite happy. the layout looks pretty identical in both firefox/safari and IE7. still working on you IE6 guys. didn’t think there would be that many IE6 users floating around in my circle of friends.
wordpress was pretty intimidating at first, but trust me when i say that after a few hours, you will get it. after figuring out which custom php function spits out what information, it’s all just a matter of placing your functions where you want that content to be displayed, messing around with your margin-lefts and margin-tops, adding some padding here and there, resizing the widths and heights of your divs and choosing your colors. it’s just like any other basic css page. wordpress has already done the hard work for you guys, all of the div organization and overflowing as well as figuring out which divs have to be relative and which are absolute.
of course, if you don’t have the resources to install wordpress on your own server, you can register at their official site for your very own blog. you’re a little bit more limited to what you can do. i think they limit how much css you can actually edit, but they have plenty of gorgeous themes to choose from. i think they also show an ad on your page once in a blue moon, but not all the time. it’s definitely better than xanga, blogger or livejournal.
