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Redesigned: tedserbinski.com
Well after running with a fairly bland blog for quite a while, I’ve spent the last few sleepless nights on the redesign and I have to say, it’s turned out quite amazing, better than I intended!
The entire site is powered by Drupal 4.7 and I’ve written a custom Drupal theme that makes use of a variety of tricks, from manipulating Drupal to making the site look correct on IE6 cough only a handful of hacks cough.
I’ve also implemented a custom backend admin menu bar/theme as well. Built with a few CSS and JS tricks, it works great. The biggest benefit is that it doesn’t clutter up the site as it always stays on top, almost seemingly out of the way. On admin specific pages I increase the width of the page to accomodate large forms, but otherwise, that is the only real tweak needed to make the admin theme tie in directly to my site. Cool, huh?
In the coming weeks I plan to write about how I designed very aspects of the site, along with, yes, releasing my admin menu bar as some sort of theme enhancement/module/what-have-you.
Till then, please let me know what you think of the redesign and if you encounter any bugs!
12 comments
All other content, unless where noted, ©2010 Theodore Serbinski. All Rights Reserved.
Very very very very very very cool looking theme!
Maybe you can do my site one day =)
Beautiful indeed ! (I already liked the previous “bare” version) The IE version is still a bit awkward though ;-)
Your menubar looks awesome – I’m eager to see that in some contrib :-)
Background from Mandolux.com?
I like the theme, nice unusual, also custom backend admin menu bar/theme looks great space saver, simplifier would you share the code? by posting here or to the Drupal.org?
Very, very slick, Ted! The green and burnt orange together are a little jarring at first, but make sense after having a little time to sink in. :)
The floating header and footer are very nice as well. Good job all the way around!
Yeah, the IE version is a bit “klunky” per se because I’m running this wonderful fixed.js technique to emulate the css property position:fixed in IE. I spent a long time looking for the best solution and this one was the simplest and least hackish and produced the smoothest result in IE.
If anyone knows of any better techniques I’m all ears so please let me know!
And yes the background is from Mandolux.com, tweaked using the Gimp’s “make seamless” function in the menu to make the background repeat at large resolutions.
As for the menu bar code, I do plan to release it soon once I clean it up a bit more and add a few more features. It’s already been tested on all major browsers and working great so very soon!
I’m seriously considering using Drupal for some of my websites, but I’m finding it hard to get inspiration (or rather insights) from actual Drupal implementations. Are you using the blog module or stories for your blog? Would you consider posting a â€Âthis is how I did it†article – or even a Lullabot podcast episode – and talk about how you get from â€Âsite idea/ mock-up†to choosing the right modules and deciding how get the site done â€Âthe Drupal wayâ€Â?
Flemming, you are certainly correct, finding the right insight on how to build a Drupal website can be quite a daunting task and unfortunetly there are not too many articles on that subject. But hopefully soon we’ll have some more as I’d like to write a couple.
As for this website, I’m actually only using the story module for my blog posts. The blog module is misnamed as it’s really a multi-user blog module. Functionally, it works the same as the story module, the only difference is it adds a few links for aggregating posts by various others, something that is not needed for a single author blog.
That plus a kick-@$$ design is all that is really powering this site. Really not much :-)
Nice site! I love that everything is inline and simple. I’m so sick of seeing people’s site’s with soooo much crap all over then place. With the whole web2.0 thing too, I get sick of seeing people’s sidebar cluttered with the whole social thing (digg this, furl this, spurl this, etc).
Also thx for the instructional vid on drupal. I don’t know if you are the one making the new TWiT website, but am looking foward to it, it’s a very kickass podcast, but the current TWiT site is horrible.
Yes I’m actually the lead developer on the new TWiT site. And honestly, it’s been ready for a while, just been Leo who’s been slow. He actually mentioned that on episode 25 of Inside the Net, which I talked about in a previous post.
Realistly, looking at mid-end of July now :-)
Beautiful design. I envy you. There is one probem though. I cannot read your site on Nokia E61 with the standard Nokia web browser. The top and bottom sections of the screen cover the middle section.
Hmm, I’ll have to look into that, might need to tweak the CSS degradation, thanks!
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