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TWD
26 Sep 2006, 07:47 PM
Here's my current design.
http://macrocosm.dyndns.ws/macrocosmpage.JPG

The URL for the webpage is just http://macrocosm.dyndns.ws/

So this is really a couple of issues at hand here.

This is generally a personal webpage. However, I've found in the past that I've focused far too much on myself, and quite frankly nobody cares about that. I want this to be more of a TWD's mind working for you sort of thing. Not only do I want to have a blog sort of deal, and also the standard tutorials and so forth. I also love making things in PHP so I plan on having several projects on my website that feature user generated content. The hope is that some of these projects will have enough content to become webpages of their own some day. The people it will attract will mostly be the tech/gamer types.

So I've had this web design several years ago. I always liked the colors and stuff. I took a break from web development for about two years and when I came back with a fresh view of things I decided that my current design just isn't very good. The teal sidebars footer and especally the header are extreemly distracting. The focus isn't on the content where it should be. I've also discovered that webpages just flat out look different now days.

So I want to redo things. I've been reading a lot, and I particularly like this article http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/attention_map.cfm and want to apply some of the principles in it. It's not easy though I'm totally taking everything I knew and changing it. It's kinda hard to know where to start.

Which brings me to my main question. Right now my site uses a darker color scheme with a black background. Black has a lot of advantages, but I find it also makes it hard to highlight the important parts of your page. If you put any kind of graphic it can look really cool with the color, but it will draw the focus away from where it should be. On the split side I want to give my site a little bit of an edge. I'm tired of everything looking like Ipods. What can you do to make a dark page work, or should I try something else?