I’ve completed the redesign of this web site and it is now live. It’s been three years since I had a new look and the last one was a template available that I just modified. This new look I created from the ground up. I hand coded everything, XHTML, CSS and Expression Engine dynamic tags. It’s really been a great learning experience for me and I’ve definitely improved my understanding of CSS.

EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that!EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that! yeah! Personally I’ve gotten a little tired of all the hype surrounding 2.0 web sites and software upgrades to 2.0.51.3.6 so I decided to have a little fun with my blog name.

Before I get into anymore details I’m going to post up a screen shot of the blog as it’s looked for the past three years so I don’t forget. The image is quite long because my monitor is 22” in vertical profile - almost no vertical scrolling for me.

And a screen shot of the current version as i’m sure it will change in the future as well. One thing I’ve done is remove the forums and wiki since no one was using them. If enough interest were expressed, I would bring them back.

I’ve added a few little effects to the site - one that I particularly like is that now any link to a file (.pdf .pub .xls .pdf .zip) will now automatically have an icon appended to the link making it clearer what is a download and what is a web page. You can see it in action on my entry about powerpoint jeopardy.

I’ve also set up comments to use avatars. If you are a member of this site, then you can upload an avatar (100x100) or you can use a gravatar (80x80 - maximum size allowed by gravatar plugin). If you don’t do either than your comment will end up with a generic silhouette avatar. I like avatars because it can really help regular readers to identify each other visually and adds a little style and class to the comment page.

Technical Stuff

I learned a lot by reading CSS Mastery which is co-authored by Simon Collision who just happened to have created my previous look. I also ready Principles of Beautiful Web Design and various web sites. The Expression Engine forums has a very helpful community that I could not live without.

Probably my greatest assistance came from Andy Harris, an active member on the Expression Engine forums - he seemed to be paying special attention to my twitters and posts on the forums and even went so far as to offer me extensive advice via email. Through Andy I came to discovered Firebug (firefox extension) and the IE Developer Toolbar which are indispensable for web development. Andy also ensured that I learned how to add a seperate style sheet to deal with the troubles that come from internet explorer.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with photoshop, but that has mostly been with photo touch up. Making backgrounds for the web was a learning experience. I’m sure I have a lot to learn still - I think my site might be a little slow to load as I didn’t do a particularly great job with optimizing images. The problem I had was that compression resulted in a horrible look. I need to learn how to design so that my images can be compressed without getting destroyed in the process.

There are still a couple of minor changes to be done to the look. I need to add the dynamic comment preview, as well as buttons for HTML code in comments. I haven’t yet decided if I want to go with the show/hide option with extended text that I had in the previous look. For now, I’ll just have a link to the rest of the entry.  I also want to add the ability to edit comments for a limited time after submission.

Please do come and take a look at the site and tell me what you think in the comments as well as vote in the poll.

What’s Next

What’s next for me. Next week starts final exams (2 weeks) so I’ll be busy grading. During the vacation, I will be working on a my research - writing it up for journals and potential presentations. I’ll also be preparing for KOTESOL 2008 where I’ll be presenting on extensive reading.

I also plan to further my web development/design skill by further reading in the field and practical experience. I’ll be redesigning my family site, Let’s Learn Korean, another personal site and I’l be building two new sites: my teaching portfolio site and a site for my web design business - Create Sean (say it quickly and it sounds like “creation”. Clever isn’t it?