So then, the story behind this version of the site. To be honest, I've forgotten which version I'm up to with these cause lots of versions don't see the light of day and end up retrospectively being called prototypes. Or because I like to think that my site is vaguely important and interesting, I like the idea of thinking of previous designs as test liveries, a bit like pre-season F1 cars that are being tested are often a simple black colour.

Firstly, the change in domain name was a result of me having my previous one taken off me cause I didn't dial-in to my previous ISP often enough (yes, dial, so not broadband). So I came to choose a new one and decided to take advantage of the .me.uk domain seeing as this type of site was what it was intended for. Crab Helmet Hire was debated as a domain but only people who knew what they were looking for would find that.

With the new hosting came new possibilities for using pHp and MySQL. I'd never liked the lack of being able to take the branding off a LiveJournal, or the fact that it always looked like a LiveJournal. However, a personal website should revolve around what that person does, so a journal is really essential. My journal is the purpose of my site. I went for Wordpress cause of it's customisation and slightly better user interface than CuteNews.

The other dynamic section of my site is intended to be my gallery. I've always had issues with these on my sites cause of sizing of the pictures and fitting them nicely into Blogs etc. So, again, taking advantage of my new hosting I've whacked up a Coppermine Gallery. Bit of a pain maybe swapping between the Gallery and Journal but at least the pictures will be easy to view even when a journal post is really old.

That's an explanation of the content anyway. The other stuff is no different to previous versions of the site.

The design took ages to get inspiration for. As usual I like pages that have a content area, but the rest I don't like to change. In other words, I dislike scroll bars. Firefox will ruin the site by not rendering them, but anyway.

I was browsing Aston Martin's website and stumbled across a microsite for one of their cars that was a similar layout to this one. It was a gray and black number with a tad of dark red. I played with these colours initially but they weren't quite right. The site looked wrong. Not necessarily dull and it was clean enough, but it just wasn't right. The thing was that I wanted some different colours to those that I'd used before - something fresh, something bright and something with contrast.

Then came the inspiration. I was watching the 2007 French Open Final at Roland Garros between Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal. Now, I'm a bit of a Nadal fan. So these colours are really inspired by the colours of his playing kit. I think they work quite well and achieve the look. Officially they are white (duh!), Chlorine Blue (light blue) and Obsidian (dark blue). The green when you click a button is Clear Jade.

The font is Times Sans Serif - a free version of Opus used by Aston Martin. Again, adds a touch of elegance while my dropping the case of my i's is something I do with my handwriting and is just intended to take some of the formality away.

I think it's turned out OK this one. It's hopefully a bit more timeless and long lasting than the others. Obviously there's no animation like the last one and it's based solely on the colour and the content rather than any quirky design bits or images of people which seem to dominate personal websites for people just wanting to blog.

There's a link to MySpace which is just an experiment on my part. I wanted to see if I can make it look good having seen a number of naff designs when I've browsed it before. If people want to be my friend then they can. I wanted to make it look like it belonged to this site though and I think it's come out OK.