The New Look of JeremyGustafson.net

After the debut of the new Minnehaha Academy website on August 1st, I felt inspired one late evening not long after to redesign my own site. What would I do differently, though? Well, I knew I wanted shadows and rounded corners, and a centered banner with colored bars on the side, and I wanted to change all my pages over to PHP so that I could have more fun programming stuff in the future (or at the very least, port over my email obfuscator function that I used on MA's site). That was a starting point, at least.

At first I wanted to have a fluid, or dynamic, width center column for content, but in order to get shadows to work with this I realised it would necessitate a lot of extra (read: "cluttered") HTML in the page than I wanted (nine <div>s would be necessary in order to form a 3x3 grid, where the center box is the content and the surrounding 8 are all various corner and side shadows–Ick!). In the end I caved and stuck with a fixed width center (one of the latest trends in websites recently, sadly making me non-unique).

With a fixed-width site, doing shadows and round corners became easier. After a lot of looking around at various other sites I discovered there really is no standard way of doing shadows, so I took one of the simpler solutions I encountered: plain ol' JPGs for the top, middle, and bottom, each in their own <div>. I also added a shadow to the link bar, very much inspired by Panic's Coda software page (now there are some awesome web designers).

In addition to pretty shadows I also needed a new banner. I'm not a graphic designer, so I borrowed ideas from other sites that I found (and liked). Inspired by Ash Web Studio, I wanted curvy lines that faded out to the sides, and I wanted very simple text, like Andrew Escobar's banner. You can see the result at the top of this page.

Lastly, or, actually, firstly, I wanted to lighten up my site's color scheme to happier, near-white colors, and ended up keeping a slightly blue tint to them, at least for the day-time version (yes, the site looks different whether it's day or night in Minnesota!). I guess that's so that it sort of matches the paint in my house...

After many hours writing and rewriting content, and many more hours battling CSS, JavaScript, and IE6 madness, the site went live the evening of March 8th, 2008, almost a full 7 months after I began working on it. Enjoy! (And if you spot any bugs, let me know!)

~ Jeremy