First of all, I’m probably the last one to wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2008, but I’ve been very busy last few days.
I’m still working on the new layout. As an exclusive I’ll give you a little preview of what’s it’s going to look like further down in this post.

Yesterday was my little daughter’s birthday, already 2 years old, I can’t believe how fast time flies.
On the 31st December I had to bring my girlfriend to the doctor, she was complaining about a pain in her stomach and her ear. On the 1st of January we supposed to go and eat with her family, but because she was this sick, we’ve cancelled it. We’ll make up for it in the future.

But I’m drifting away, back to topic.
When I’ve started this blog, I just made a quick design, sliced it a bit and created a CSS file to put behind the code.
After some coding and putting everything together the blog experienced it’s D-Day. At that time, only 6 months back, I thought the design was OK.

But as with everything from time to time you need a change to push your blog to the next level.

This time I took my time to create a design, in fact, I’ve made a dozen layouts on paper and 5 of them where roughly created on my pc. I then let it rest for a few days to get a fresh look at it the next time I’ve opened them.
At this point I pushed myself to select 2 out of the 5 rough designs to actually develop into real designs.
When this was finished I let it rest again for 2 days. In the mean while I’ve mailed it to a couple of friends to take a look and give me their opinions about the 2 designs. When I got their answers I had another look and together with my friends opinions I made a decision on which one to choose.

After slicing the new design I made a brand new CSS file and put it live in my test environment.
At this moment everything seems to be working well, only a few minor tweaks still need to be applied.

Also I’ll need to make some time to make myself a decent advertise page so possible advertisers know what it would cost to get their banner on this site. I pushed myself not to put the new layout live until the advertise page is live also.

If everything goes well, there will be no downtime. It can happen that there will be some crazy stuff happening, but I believe everything will be applied pretty fast.
This mainly because I only have to do some copy and pasting now from the test environment to the live environment. Another thing that will help this migration is the way I’ve created my code for this blog from the start. Almost everything can be reused and be placed anywhere to work, I hate duplicate code.

For those who can’t wait until then here’s a screenshot of a piece of the design.

What do you think about it so far?
Will it get this blog to the next level?

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