I just never got round to design and building a new layout. I just didn’t have any inspiration or time really. I really liked my previous layout so didn’t want to take it down for a long time.

This layout is to promote the new structure to my blog. As you can see there’s a set of navigation above which are the categories I will be posting in most. I want to write more topic specific entries as well as everyday things. I really would like readers to be actively commenting on post from those categories.

I will return all comments from any category so feel free to browser around in the future.

Likely that I’ll be amending the layout and fixing bugs here and there in the next few days. Let you know what you think and let me know of any errors or improvements.

I optimised this site by doing the following three things:

Resize file size of images

Most people these days do have fast internet so loading web pages with a few images aren’t really a problem anymore. However it is always good to reduce the loading time as much as possible especially for those that are viewing websites via their 3G mobile phones.

You can reduce the file size of your images while keeping the quality by using “Save for Web & Device” rather than “Save” or “Save as”. There’s several options you can pick to help you reduce the file size.

Avoid transparent background if possible

Many web developers love using transparent backgrounds with PNGs however we should avoid that. They are extremely useful however transparent PNGs are not supported in IE6. The transparent part will just appear grey in IE6.

Isn’t that important if your site is a personal site that would only be viewed by others bloggers (where most of them will be using FireFox, Chrome or latest IE), however it is extremely important if you plan to show your site to recruiters or as part of your portfolio.

One image instead of two for image links

The main links next to the logo (i.e. Home, Owner, Visitor) are images with another image hover state. Originally I had the normal & hover state as two separate images. I made them all into one image and move the background position on the hover state.

background-position:62px 0;

You must be wondering that difference does that make. On page load, only the images that are visible will be loaded. The hover state version of the links aren’t visible till you actually hover over the links. The first time you hover over it, it will start to load the image. Which causes a small delay where the link disappears and reappears a few seconds later.

If you have it as one image (e.g. normal & hover state next to each other) then both the states will be loaded on page load.

I downloaded a few new fonts from dafonts.com and just started messing about with the use of these fonts. I spent many hours last night drawing this out on Photoshop and continued with it this morning.

I’m using two new fonts that I downloaded call Sansation (Essencious.org part) & Journal (used in the main navigation). You can find them both at dafonts.com if you want to download them too.

After that, I went ahead with coding it into a WordPress theme. Half way through I wanted to give up and do it another time, but I know that if I leave it I probably won’t come back to it for ages. With some motivation and will power, I managed to completely finish the layout in just under 24hrs

I’m actually pretty happy with this layout so I’ll probably stick with it for a while.

I hope I’ll have sudden inspiration again soon so I’ll create another pretty layout.

I have finally put up a new layout. It’s just something simple I put together while I was bored at work. I’ve always been a big sucker for simple, clean & easy to read layouts.

Another new thing in my life is Windows 7! I’ve been using Windows Vista for the last year and completely hate it. It’s so so so slow. Over the weekend I installed Windows 7.

The OS in general is much quicker compare to Vista. However the task bar does need a bit of getting use to and I did find it a little confusing at first. Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty sweet.

If you’re a Vista user, I would really recommend getting Windows 7. Windows 7 is also much cheaper than the previous Window OS. Definitely something worth looking into, especially if your computer running Vista is extremely slow.

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/essencious

“Times goes by fast when you’re having fun” is commonly known saying. It is too true. The time goes by too fast when I’m at home because there’s so much I want to do. I only have about 3hrs to do my own stuff each evening. Wish it was a little bit more balanced.

Do you have moments where you feel that time is just moving way too slow or way too fast?

I’m thinking of writing a PHP application when I have time. I don’t have any good ideas what sort of application to write. Any suggestion on a web application that I can write? Anything that you want to integrate with your website? I was thinking of a link tracker (to track your external links to see people are clicking on your link exchanges, affiliates etc) or Q&A application that can be integrated with WordPress easily (could even be a WP plugin).