To distract myself from peeking at Christmas gifts, I pushed ahead with a new design. You might need to refresh your browser, to see it.

From the start I decided to do it a little different. First I did a site map, figuring out how all of the content was laid out in my site. I figured out that a few sections were extraneous, so I excised them, and consolidated others.

Then I did a wireframe. I figured out that I wanted a 4 column layout. I wanted navigation to be a vertical list on the left. I wanted a side "ad" or high attention section like before. I also wanted a fixed layout. I need to brand on to my hands "You don't design liquid layout sites that you yourself like" so I stop trying to do one.

Once all that was done I started working on a design. I started first by letting go of all of the previous colors in the site. Instead I looked for a pretty neutral palette. (I've been watching too many home flipping shows.) Once I had something I liked, I went back and added some color.

Finally, I decided on fonts, specifically, I picked Calibri to be the main font of the site. I know it's a Vista font and most people don't have it yet, so I've gone back and made sure it looks okay in Verdana and Helvetica. One thing I don't like about Calibri is that it's decidedly smaller at a given font-size than Verdana, or Arial. I'm sure someone who knows something about fonts could tell you exactly why. I am not that person.

Once the design was done, I found that I could do a few other things that I had wanted to do for a while:

• I incorporated Google Co-op powered search. Which is awesome if you haven't played with it.
• I added my latest blog content to the static sub sections of my site. RSS rocks.
• Got the download footprint of the site to be next to nothing.

I have few other things left to do, like prune away all the old sections of the site, but for the most part I'm done.

Not that original a subject, but I figured I might at least talk about it, and solicit some advice.

Due to a number of reasons I'm looking to update the look of Aarrgghh!.

1. It's not looking good cross-browser these days.
2. Dave Konopka just did a redesign that looks awesome.
3. I'm spending a fair amount of time dealing with a redesign of a site here at work.
4. I do this about every 6 months or so anyway, to keep my skills sharp.
5. I might add a little Ajax-y stuff to practice it.

My process until now has been very haphazard. I basically go to CSSZenGarden, WebdesignFromScratch, and OpenSourceWebDesign, and browse. I shop for little things I like from various examples there, and try and tie the whole thing into one design.

This tends to leave me with a site that mostly works, but doesn't really feel right, but I put up with it until I decide to do it all over again.

So instead, I'm going to take a longer look at all this. Then, I'll actually try my hand at wireframing before even look at design.

Anybody got any advice out there?

After trying pretty hard to not have to institute anything that makes commenting harder, the spammers have forced me to do something.

I tried to install a MovableType Image Captcha component... It completely fragged my MovableType install, and I had to blow it away and reinstall. I bet this wouldn't have happened to me if I was a good ColdFusion developer and started to use Blog.CFC.

After getting everything back up, I installed the Comment Challenge text-captcha plugin. It's accessible, and it doesn't, you know, completely hose my site, but I'm not sure how effective it will be. If anyone runs into any problems commenting, please drop me a line via my Contact page.