Thanks for the patience everyone for the mini-redesign

I have been working the past six hours to update the look of the site. Sorry for any weirdness that may have happened. I have learned some more about web design so I am going to try a few of those ideas out. Things I have learned from redesigning this page.

1. Don’t overwhelm people visually. For me, and probably other people all of the topics at the top menu were overwhelming. I moved all the categories to a menu named Topics. I had noticed the most popular sites don’t overwhelm people with too many menus at the top. Apple for example currently has 7 tabs/words at the top. I am not sure I need those many at the moment.
2. Don’t use another color than white for a text background. Some themes I have tried had other colors than white as the background. Personally I found it challenging to read against that.
3. Don’t get too creative with layout. Some themes had some really wacky layout options. For example one theme I tried had the option to put things at the bottom. To me, this seems silly. Who wants to scroll down all the way to the bottom to access some functionality? Also I’m not wild about the way that themes have widgets. I would prefer that widgets could always be on screen. It is common for articles to continue and you don’t have anything on the right. I am not going to fill the right widget column with junk just to keep that area filled.
4. Don’t be too arrogant in your design. Steve Jobs once famously said: It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. – Steve Jobs I have never had anyone contact me and say that they want a certain design on my site, or they hated something I did. Without feedback most of us are left guessing what seems helpful to us. I have seen some horrendous very popular websites, so people obviously have tolerance for bad design. I think it must be a trade-off people do. I visit sites that have interesting content by terrible design, but I say to myself “Well I’m only here for a little bit, I can deal with it.” I think that people get used to terrible UI‘s because they work with bad UI’s everyday. I bet that designers and Mac users are more sensitive to design than I imagine PC users and web surfers in general are.  I believe that the general public collectively is more intelligent than anyone so I am open to ideas from the crowd. I am not a designer, I just know what works for me and what I have learned from designers I have worked with.
5. Don’t think that there is one way to do design. I have seen and loved the growth of  interfaces that people expect and feel comfortable with. In the old days interfaces like Craigslist reined supreme for good reason. It was required by the technology. Now, we don’t have to do that and do far more. Some designs are clearly confusing and just irritating to use. You get confused where you should go, or you can’t go where you want to. If I meet a website that I have no idea where information is, I just leave. There are way too many good ways to get information than wasting time to try to figure out someones twisted logic. I think in that way good design is like the collective wisdom of experience. Somethings work. Like the iTunes/Windows explorer interface.