In short, he turned his landing page into a summary, turning a blog (or, at least the front page of the blog) into more of a profile page.
The home page remains clean, despite all the extra info. But to me, I don't see a huge difference...Maybe I'm just against textured backgrounds (ughh, it's horrible!).
Indeed, the textured background is pretty useless. It adds nothing significant to the visual presence of the site. All it does, at least on my monitors, is make me go, "Wait...that's not a solid color."
Personally, I would've played around with some colors and patterns more: making the headers darker and adding something in the background that would complement well.
Agreed, although his site is much prettier, and the post view pages look like dave.is or zach holman's site. It's a coincidence we are both using Interstate Condensed.
Or you can take the hardcore approach, make your own CMS, your own SQLite database, search system, comments system, sharing functions, etc.. from scratch. On the plus side, I never have to install WP security updates! ;)
But you do have to keep on top of whatever security holes there may be in your own code, and fix whatever bugs pop up. Hopefully before a XSS vulnerability is exploited.
This site is solid and quickly gives a good idea of the who the owner is and what he does. Love it. It would be great to combine this design concept and personal information with the indie web experiments (syndicating and aggregating your actions, microformatting the heck out of everything, etc) http://tantek.com/ advocates for on his personal page. Together, it's a good model for the future of the personal web presence.
OK, I'll play devil's advocate: I think the photo is wonderful.
It got me interested in who he is, got me to click around his website, got me to read some of his articles published in his college newspaper, got me reading his old email newsletters, etc.
Without a photo, I doubt I would have made that first click around.
I like it. I've been dissatisfied with my personal website ( http://yllus.com/ ) for a number of reasons, and you providing a child theme that would let me quickly switch over it just the push I needed. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback. The problem with having all the posts there is that it's difficult to order them in a way that makes sense. I argued against reverse chronological order in the post.
Maybe you could show a list of post titles and short excerpts, and clicking on any post expands the content in place.
If you work at Google, and on the Search Quality Team, no less, then shouldn't your personal page be simply a search box, with maybe a tag cloud underneath, and potentially hosted by Google App Engine or Google Sites? I'm not being sarcastic. That's what I would do, if I worked there, and had lots of content which I didn't want to continuously re-prioritize (based on who my visitors were, or what I expected they would want to see at any given moment).
[+] [-] latch|14 years ago|reply
The home page remains clean, despite all the extra info. But to me, I don't see a huge difference...Maybe I'm just against textured backgrounds (ughh, it's horrible!).
[+] [-] ineedtosleep|14 years ago|reply
Personally, I would've played around with some colors and patterns more: making the headers darker and adding something in the background that would complement well.
[+] [-] rglover|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinburke|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dendory|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somebear|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aklemm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinburke|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overcyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkudeshi|14 years ago|reply
It got me interested in who he is, got me to click around his website, got me to read some of his articles published in his college newspaper, got me reading his old email newsletters, etc.
Without a photo, I doubt I would have made that first click around.
[+] [-] rhizome31|14 years ago|reply
Great redesign overall though. I was thinking of doing something along these lines for my own site and that comforts me in the idea.
[+] [-] kevinburke|14 years ago|reply
I A/B tested a few photos on hotornot.com but I'm not sure that the photos that tested best there would do the best on my own site.
[+] [-] yllus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CMartucci|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinburke|14 years ago|reply
Maybe you could show a list of post titles and short excerpts, and clicking on any post expands the content in place.
[+] [-] ThaddeusQuay2|14 years ago|reply