DeWitt Clinton

As part of the migration to WordPress, I took the opportunity to change the layout and format of the site. Just a month ago I had done a bit of an update and basically copied Russell Beattie‘s design and tweaked it. (Don’t let that turn you off from his site — he did a much better job.) Here’s the old design, for posterity’s sake:

The move to a new set of templates started out as a challenge — I spent an hour or so trying to make the new templates look like my old site. But then it occurred to me that I didn’t even like the design of the old site. It wasted a ton of space up at the top, a pet peeve of mine, and just felt very, very white. It looked open, which is good (the emphasis is then placed on the text and/or images), but also vacant, which is not.

The new design is reproduced below for those who read it in a blog reader (though please stop by for a look):

I “solved” the problem of the wasted space in the header by building CSS and DHTML menus along the left. WordPress has a built-in search feature that actually works, so I put a search bar along the top of the page. And I no longer limit the width of the content to just 800 pixels — the user can now extend the page as far as they want. And I bumped up the font size, and modified the font selection to impart some meaning: san serif fonts for content, serif fonts for general information. The colours are still muted, but that’s basically because I’m not much of a designer. And I kept the little guy with the umbrella because I like him.

If are a WordPress user, you can grab a copy of my theme here:

wordpress-theme-unto-2005-04-21-11-06-07.tgz

You will obviously need to change the links in sidebar.php and modify header.php and footer.php. But this may be of use to someone. If so, please feel free to give me a shout on your site and a link back to unto.net.

And speaking of links back to unto.net, I’m pretty bad about posting blogrolls. It’s not that I don’t read your sites, it’s just that I want things to be clutter free. I really do appreciate all the inbound links, however few there are.

But here’s a weird thing — unto.net keeps climbing in the Alexa traffic reports, even though the vast majority of readers come from blog readers and blog aggregators (as can be seen by image hits). Since the links to Alexa traffic reports change each day, here’s a screen shot of today’s Alexa report for unto.net:

That claims unto.net is, today at least, the 24,000th most visited site on the net. Yesterday it was in the 30′s. I’m a little skeptical, seeing as how the Internet is a pretty big place. More to the point — very popular blogs, such as Jason Kottke’s have an average Alexa traffic rank of 24,000. Hell, today his site (according to Alexa), ranked in the 60′s, which (again, according to Alexa) means that I’m getting more traffic than he is. Considering that Jason has “gone pro” with his blog (he quit his day job to write for tips), and there is no way I could pull that off, something seems a little amiss here. Jason has far more readers than I do.

Maybe this means I could cover bandwidth costs by placing AdSense ads. Actually, I’m sure it does, as the types of searches that land here are usually big-ticket AdWords. But I think the Internet is commercial enough without me adding to the cacophony of advertisements. Consider the bandwidth a gift for being nice enough to stop by.

Anyway, if you are reading unto.net, that’s great — thank you! I’m sure it will slip back into obscurity before long. And as always, I’d love to hear what you think.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under meta. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.