Two lovely designers who trade the occasional hour with me and eat my curries and drink my hooch have informed me that all the various sites grouped under oreneta.com need to change. The Baldie needs to be legible by users over 35. Kalebeul needs more identity (someone said duotint photo 2 in sepia; I tried to photo a couple of gypsy prostitutes outside the Montjuic cemetery today for this purpose and almost got run over by their pimp), pictures and white space, and less great big heaps of words. The Libro Verde is deeply confusing. Oreneta looks like a wannabe boring girly homework site. Wouldn’t it be nice to run everything off a roughly similar template. Etc. Things will change, although probably not particularly rapidly. Your suggestions, as always, are also welcome.

Categories: Les bourgeois, Splog

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1. Tom
   October 28th 2008 09:08

   I think a ‘refresh’ would be good but the basic design of your site is OK (if a little cluttered). You should probably also provide better site navigation on each page as this will make it easier to get around, and boost your site in SEO terms.

   Are you making any cash out of the Google ads? If not, I suggest toning them down a tad…

2. Trevor
   October 28th 2008 09:55

   You’re right, the nav is crap on both the baldie and this. Gugel pays for the IT costs and a decent meal once a month but they’re way overdone on the front page and would produce more if the kalebeul code weren’t full of toxic shite improvised to deal with IE5 for Mac and if G blog search could find its way past said toxic poo to index stuff.

3. El Ciruco
   October 28th 2008 14:11

   Hint: the 110% button in Opera cures almost everything. It’s just a little snug.

4. Trevor
   October 29th 2008 22:27

   This small hack will be of interest to some. It makes your WordPress 2.6.3 posts wrap round RH then LH content, like the New York Times does. It only works if you’re using the <!--more--> tag to generate excerpts in your posts and have Settings/Reading/Full text feeds turned on.

   1. Open /wp-includes/post-template.php and on line 121 change
      $output .= '<span id="more-'.$id.'"></span>'.$content[1];
      to
      $output = '<span id="more-'.$id.'"></span>'.$content[1];
      In other words, kill the full stop before =
   2. Open your theme’s single.php
   3. Before the loop, declare
      global $more;
   4. To display the excerpt in the body, use
      $more = 0;
the_content('');
      You can now hang content to the right of it, or whatever.
   5. To display the rest of the post (ie not the whole post) in the body, use
      $more = 1;
the_content();
      You can now hang content to the left of it, or whatever.

   Worked for me anyway. Probably too bloody complicated for a humble blogger like myself, although possibly of some use over at the baldie.

5. kalebeul » Blog Archive » Testing redesign
   January 28th 2009 16:38

   [...] I promised ages ago I’d do something about all these sites and then did nothing. I’ve taken advantage of the recession to do a bit of monkeying around last night and today, so this bit–the Bald Executioner–will probably look crap for the next week or so until I get round to sorting out the mechanics and the look. New stuff it does (in theory): hierarchical breadcrumbs (or whatever they’re called) provided via menu highlights, automatic selection of short posts to go in sidebar, automatic generation of front page ‘bove fold layout using Picasa to produce thumbnails etc, introduction of fixed group of regular linked-to items and selection of others (front page below fold), tags, er, um. [...]