I am not often blown away anymore by web design. I have been surfing the web since 1993 – been with it since there wasn’t a browser with image support, and “seen it all”. So, I guess what I am saying is, I am not easily impressed.
But Lauri Mueller’s Minnesota Gardener weblog, based on the same weblog system I am using – MovableType (yes, amazingly – its true – it dosen’t have to look as bad as this) just blew me away. And she’s a Flash designer too, too bad I am happily married, or I would have flown over and proposed to her on the spot. ;-) And I think I would offer my right arm to have this girl redesign my weblog.
Found the link to her site at “What Do I know“, which is another impressive implementation of the MovableType blog software.
Oh, PS: Branden Hall has updated his weblog to use MovableType too…
No offense, but what’s the big deal about Minnesota Gardener?
Apart from the very nice footer image I find the page graphically not something I’ll remember an hour or so from now.
If you check out her site on 800×600 (and every reasonable webdesigner does this) then you’ll notice that she wastes an *awful* lot of space before the real site comes up. I mean, one article and a *huge* image is not my idea of effecient use of space.
I guess this shows how much taste can differ ;-)
Hey, I liked it, what can I say :-) I might have gone over the edge in my fanfare about it, but hey.. tast differ – right? :-)
The site does use a LOT of space on the top, she have apperantly noticed that herself, since she is starting her lastest posting at the top, to be continued further down. Looks like that is how its done for every new posting.
About the web-designer comment, I wouldn’t even dream of calling myself a web-duh-signer (sorry, couldn’t help myself), I mean – just look at my site. The only thing I have tried to put effort into when it comes to the look of it, is that the font should be readable. But checking it out now, I see that I need to fix my stylesheet so that it is actually possible to easily change the font size in most any browser. As it is now the font is set in pixels, and not pm’s… (Bad me). Note to self, fix stylesheet.
Thanks for the compliments, Jarle. I respect Remco’s opinion and understand his comment about my use of a large image. Normally, I do keep the content on the page high when designing commercial sites. An early incarnation of the design had used the same top banner as the interior pages so that would have been more to his liking. But I decided to go for more of a magazine-like design above the fold featuring the latest article in larger type since many of my visitors are repeaters and are only interested in the newest entry. I would have liked to have seen Remco’s idea of design but his site is broken and I only see an error message.
; )