Technovangelism

Finally, design number five. Spring Break got in the way of me finishing on time, but all is well again. I have come to the realization that the only other colors that can be used with dark red are varying shades of gray. Sometimes you can sneak some green in for a little more contrast, but your options are limited. Lots of elements were inspired by Basecamp project pages.

Overall

I finally added all of the elements I have been promising to add. I dropped the sidebar and added its content to the footer. It allows for more focus on the main content pieces, but might reduce the focus on the Links and Awards section a little too much. I want people to see these, so keeping a sidebar around is necessary.

Header

I like the use of the main color in the header background. If I ever want to change the primary theme color, it would be simple to swap it out with something else.

Main Content Area

When displaying a unread thread, I like to indicate the number of unread posts and how long ago the last post was made. Normally, it takes too many letters if I want to spell out all of that information, but with the red dot design, I can indicate how many unread posts are in each thread. The bigger the dot, the more unread posts.

With reduced space for the calendar, I chose to not make all days the same width. Days with events are larger so more of the name can be seen. The “Add New Event” button is there to make it somewhat consistent with the list of threads having a link in each of the day boxes would take up a lot of room.

Sidebar

No sidebar! I finally tried removing it. Not sold on the idea. Sidebars provide important functionality, trying to pack two pieces of content into the main area forces them both to be too narrow.

Footer

Large footers are more appropriate for blog and CMS style websites. They have lots of loosely-connected pages that need links. Threads in a forum need to be listed somewhere, but there are far too many to cram into a footer. Even a small site like mine produces hundreds of threads per month, and most of them lose relevance within a few days. The final design is unlikely to have a large footer like this.