Just a quick update. In the last week I made some changes to the design and layout of this blog. And you may have noticed, the appearance of the posts has changed to more of a grid layout when accessing the site from a laptop or desktop computer.

The sidebar has also been moved to the left side and now contains parts of the site’s navigation. The big old graphic at the top, which took up a lot of screen space and time to load in the old site design, has been removed. I also made a couple of other minor back-end tweaks to improve site navigation, including having added a slight tween effect when you hover your pointer over a post thumbnail on the new layout.

Below are screenshots of the old and new layout for you to quickly see the visual changes:

Old Blog Layout

New Blog Layout

If you usually access the site from a mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone, the site will still look similar to the way it did before. That is because the old site was already designed to appear as a grid on mobile devices and would optimize its layout automatically for each different portable device size, depending on screen resolution, something known as a “Responsive” website.

Responsive websites are something I have always been big on and had discussed in another blog post about 3 years ago entitled “Why Websites Need To Be Responsive For The Rapidly Growing Mobile Web World“.

I also fixed a coding issue on this site for mobile devices where thumbnails of YouTube videos linked within a post would not resize themselves to fit in a smaller screen size area. If you visit a blog post now on a mobile device which contains a YouTube video, like the last one I posted here, you will be able to see how the video thumbnail fits into the site layout properly and doesn’t hinder finger scroll-ability of the post as it did before. Just a minor detail, but I am mentioning it in case any of you are web designers yourselves and might be interested in knowing about these kinds of tweaks.

I feel though the most noticeable improvement to the site visitor experience is mainly the better readability of posts. Easier on the eyes, making the text more pleasurable to read, with a bigger font, better line and paragraph spacing, faster site loading, and a cleaner, more minimalist layout of posts when viewing on desktop and laptop computers. The new design is also something known as a “Masonry” layout, which is the grid-like pattern you see in the new site layout screenshot above.

Some people may not take much interest in the minor details of how a website runs, as long as it loads quickly, especially if they are just looking for a fast bit of information from a site before moving on. But I believe attention to detail is always a good idea when designing something. Plus, focusing on making subtle improvements which can set one website apart from another is a good idea when one is swimming in the big sea of cyberspace.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions on the new site design changes please feel free to let me know.