Finally set foot to update the look and feel of the website. There were several issues with previous layout that I wanted to solve, and I think most of them are met with the new look and underlying rendering engine.

Since november 2011, this website and blog is running as static HTML pages generated by locally run script. I really love this setup - find it far superior to WordPress I was using before. While it requires greater front-most investment, it allows much more versatiliy down the road. It’s also faster, both to create content and to serve it.

Given that, I had few issues I wanted to address for some time now. Most glaring one was retina support for images, but also modernize the look and navigation of the website a bit. I also discovered alternative static website generator a while ago called middleman. It seemed to be more configurable than PieCrust, PHP framework I used so far. So during past few months I slowly started experimenting and came to point where I felt I can start using the website.

As said, one of the main areas I wanted to address ever since purchasing Retina MacBook Pro was support for retina displays. With help of retina.js this was a breeze. Of course it required updating all the images, but I had to do so anyway due to layout changes. And I simply left old blog post images as they were. Related to retina were website elements: buttons and similar. Previously they were using images but on the new site all are styled purely in CSS without images. The only area left are pretty photo images - such as on Startupizer page. I’m using pretty photo for this and the script doesn’t support retina by default. And I also didn’t take the time to try and tweak it yet.

As for the navigation, the website remains mainly as it was before. There are few pages that were not being possible before, mainly for blog - archives by years for example. There are still few areas that would need attention - like links to blog and contact pages from home page. Currently they are somewhat hard to see buttons at the bottom of the page. The reason for this is I really wanted to keep home page as simple and clutterless as possible.

Not everything made the transition (yet): missing are appledoc example pages; these require restructuring and bringing them up to date, which means attention and time investment beyond what I can currently give.

I won’t be posting before/after images this time for the same reason. You can check old design here.

Hopefully you’ll like the results.