On the heels of announcing that I was going to redo my site, I got a notice from my host that I had gone over my bandwidth allotment. Therefore, in addition to my other goals, I added "making a leaner site over all." So I took some inspiration from a few sites and came up with a site that comes in 50% - 60% leaner than the current design.

In order to come up with the site, I went to my usual inspiration sources. I went to css Zen Garden but nothing grabbed me. Then I went to Web Design from Scratch's Current Web Style rundown. (Cool site, by the way, and runs on CFML.) From there I was going to go with a design inspired by Carlos Cabera's site, but I couldn't quite get inspired without outright stealing, so I had to ditch it. Then I saw Riding Rails, the blog dedicated to Ruby on Rails. I really like that strong logo, and minimalist design, and decided that I liked that, and could emulate without stealing.

The other thing I decided to do was use the new fonts from Microsoft that are going to be part of their next set of software releases. Now I know it is a little too early to be using them, but I just couldn't resist. I think you can still find them out there in the wild if you know how to search for them. I have to say, I really like the way the new site looks in them.

By the way, the whole bandwidth thing happened not because I had a surge of popularity, but rather because I got slammed by some MySpace users directly linking some of my odder pictures:

• Creepy Baby
• Live 8 Draws the Bests People
• Cohiba Robusto (decidedly not odd)