Brand new look, same old crap

Hey… something looks a little different around here…

For those of you who noticed that I’ve been gone the past couple of days, thanks for sticking around. For those of who didn’t notice, rest assured that there’s about 6.7 billion people in the same boat as you.

Either way, here’s the brand new look of The Modernish Father. I’d like to say that I slaved away on it, but the truth of the matter is that I took a freebie design from the excellent folks over at WooThemes and customized it for my own evil purposes.

To address any concerns or questions you may have about the new design, I’ve preemptively drawn up a list of questions and concerns (euphemisms for complaints) that some of you may have – an NYAPNFAQ, if you will. I’ve even seen fit to answer them.

Not yet and probably never frequently asked questions (NYAPNFAQ)

Why the change?
First of all, I’d been using the same design for nearly three years. That’s about the average shelf-life for a design in general and for those of us who do this kind of thing for a living, it’s an eternity. It was just time to shake things up.

The old template was built for an ancient version of WordPress and just didn’t include/support many of the great features that have been rolled out over the past 20 bajillion versions of the software. I’ve been patching and rigging things where I could, but it was starting to get really tiresome. I thought about building a new template that copied the look and feel of the old one while incorporating the newer code, but blah – what’s the point of that? If you’re going to have tear everything down to remodel, you might as well build something better.

What’s up with all the orange? I thought you were an Aggie.
I still bleed maroon, but I recognize that there are other colors in the rainbow (besides, I deal in maroon all day at work and it’s not like I’m using burnt orange). After testing a number of different colors, I decided that orange was the best compliment for the shade of blue I had settled on. The most important factor was making sure that links stood out in the text. I have a strong aversion to underlining links (it’s fugly and so 1996) and I realize that the link color in the old design was pretty easy to miss. If you miss the links now, that’s your problem.

If you really hate the orange, don’t worry too much. One of the great things about the new design is that’ll be easy for me to switch things chromatically from time to time. The orange may last two days or two years. Difficult to tell. Always in motion is the future.

So how frequently will you be changing the colors/graphics?
I’m imagining, at the most, maybe once every 3-4 months. I just don’t have the time to completely overhaul everything like some people do. Of course, given my laziness, there’s also a good chance that things will never get changed.

We fear change. Why must you introduce chaos where order exists?
Change is inevitable. You must learn to embrace it. In fact, the old design wasn’t even the original design for TMF. This was.

When you throw in all of the designs I had for The Interactive Roz (this site’s predecessor) over the better part of a decade, I have a fairly consistent track record of overhauling things at inconsistent intervals. This is isn’t my first redesign rodeo, nor is it likely to be my last.

Let me be clear – I really loved the old design and debated for months whether I should leave it behind or not. In the end though, progress beat out nostalgia.

Argh. You’ve taken the categories and monthly archives out of the sidebar. How will I ever find them again?
Sorry, they were taking up way too much real estate on the side and my analytics showed that not many of you were using them anyway. You can still get to category/monthly archives by clicking on the “Archives” tab at the top of the page (intuitive, no?). To view all of the posts in a particular category, you can also click on the orange category box beneath the title of any post.

Some portions of the site look kinda wonky.
Yeah, I still need to go back and reformat a lot of the older posts. For the time being, anything older than March 2009 or so is kind of  “swim at your own risk.” There’s something wrong with the some of archive pages too. I hope to get that all fixed in the next couple of days. Like everything on the interwebz, it’s a work in progress.

Did run that photo of the The Wife past her before you stuck it in the header?
Of course not. You people should know me better by now.

So, any new content features planned to coincide with this changing of sheets?
Yes and no. I do have plans for a new recurring feature that may or may not launch this Friday. It’ll be a regular weekly kind of thing with a consistent schema, much like Wordless Wednesday. The timing is purely coincidental – it’s not really tied into or enhanced by the redesign at all.

I’ve also got something else planned to launch around the end of the year, but it won’t use this site design. That’s about all I can say about it at the moment until I work out some more of details.

Whoa, your favicon is a little creepy! It’s like there’s a miniature version of you staring into my soul from my browser tab.
Then I’ve created the intended effect.

Can we pay you to switch the site back to the old version?
Absolutely. Smaller, non-sequential, unmarked bills work best. I’ll contact you with the drop information. No cops.