So the initial response on this little tumble blog design has been overwhelmingly positive. I think the concept stands on its own rather well. Naturally, there is a lot of things that could be improved. Improved functionality, design, etc. I really think it will be worth exploring as I develop this further.

First and foremost, the legend at the top of the page. As it is now, it provides a visual clue to where on the page you will find certain things. It also exists to make the design more visually distinctive and appealing. That, as it stands, is all it does. But it can become so much more. The possibilities, of course, are endless. One initial idea is to create the bars into links themselves that direct to a page showing only, for example, links or videos. I think it can go farther than that, but I’m not sure how. I am excited to develop it further into a unique way of navigating a website. 

Second, there is, granted, a ton of whitespace. While I do love some good whitespace, depending on what kind of blog entries I become prone to posting (right now I think the majority of them will most likely be links) the arrangement and position of these things on the page may need to be adjusted. Or, perhaps another element is added to create a better harmony and balance. Right now, the concept drives the design. I spoke earlier to “streams” of content as opposed to a single “river” where everything is dumped. This is a quite organic way of thinking about page design, and it’s overall success will likely depend on an evaluation of how that organism develops and making iterative adjustments. We’ll see how it goes.

There are also still technical problems with the site. Some things are off. The videos—due to how tumblr puts them into the site—don’t hit the width I would desire them to be. Photos wouldn’t either, lest I hacked them together with a hand-coded width. The archive and rss links at the top don’t work. I also haven’t spent much time testing this site in various browsers and operating systems.

My plan, at this point, is to bring this design and concept into ExpressionEngine. The power and flexibility of ExpressionEngine will provide better avenues for exploring the concept and increase the quality of code and organization. I’m looking forward to it.