After months of off-and-on work, I'm happy to finally show off the freshly-redesigned Flyosity.com.

Here's a quick list of what's new:

• Cleaner, simpler, sharper, less blue, more white.
• There is now a separate homepage that's not merely a list of blog entries. Those are over here.
• My portfolio is back.
• A new services page for people interested in having me work on their apps. More on this in a bit.
• A nicer, more carefully written about section with an extremely classy photo frame.
• An updated contact page that works better than the last one. Spammers, let's do this.
• On single article pages the navigation bar is sticky at the top as you scroll for quick access.
• Now I actually link to Design Then Code. Fancy that.

Thoughts On The New Design

The previous design looked faddish and I stopped liking it almost instantly after it went live. Too blue, too bubbly, too a lot of things. For this design I wanted something that would stand up and look good awhile from now, not fall on its face and be dated in a month. But at the same time, I wanted to keep the elements of the previous design that I thought worked well, namely, the typography design for an individual article. The column width is the same, the fonts are the same, and the spacing is nearly the same, but the chrome around it is now cleaner and more subdued.

Up to about a week ago, a lot of things on the page animated into position; logos fading in, navigation sliding across, etc. After taking a hard look at it, I decided to remove the superfluous initial animations and take the experience down a notch into a more subdued feel. I love animation, and I really love CSS3 keyframe animation, but I don't want people to be distracted if they're here on my site to read an article, especially if they came here via a search engine. So, I took it all out.

One design concept I really liked about the previous site was that nearly every section of the site had its own feel with a slightly customized version of the main layout. I wanted to retain that same feeling with the redesign, so you'll notice that my portfolio, services page, about section and contact form all have a look that's unique compared to the other main sections. Personal sites can get rather tedious so I wanted to make sure visitors were greeted with a little bit more personality than they were expecting.

Services

I don't take on much client work, in fact, I haven't said "yes" to a project for a number of years until very recently. The reasons for this are numerous, but primarily it's a matter of time. I have a fun full-time job (that I don't plan on quitting) so outside of work if I'm using my computer I'm typically working on Design Then Code or various unfinished apps. However, outside projects can be fun if they're the right kind of project, so I'm taking a bit of a leap and plan to take on a few, small projects throughout the year. My new services page outlines the type of things I offer as well as my current hourly rate.

And Finally

As someone who doesn't blog as much as he should, I believe I'm contractually obligated to say that this redesign will make me want to write more. I hope that's the case, but please don't hold your breath!

And, oh yeah, there's a tweet button now at the bottom of all entries. I hear it's what the cool kids are doing.