Welcome back to the post-holiday routine, everyone. As I write, I imagine I hear a resoundingly unanimous sigh — yes, at work again — if only there had been just another week. Without a doubt I share the sentiment. After the brief hiatus in posting (in no way indicative of any epic vacationing, believe me), I return with several updates and business at terminal velocity as usual. Usually it’s at the start of the new year when I find myself wanting to do a bit of house-cleaning. The extent of this is mostly determined by the ongoings of the year before and how much malleable time is at one’s disposal for tidying through the stylesheet, shaking up the layout, or going for a complete theme overhaul. Working on brand profiles for other people year-round can often make you forget entirely about your own until you have ten minutes of headspace to contemplate how you’ve let yours slip silently past and how dated it’s all begun to look in retrospect. But I began on a series of minor adjustments ahead of the WP upgrade towards the end of last year to gauge what tweaking would still be required or would be purely cosmetic come 2009, and more than anything to keep things from shifting too drastically in one way or another only to decide by February that it had all been unnecessary.
Because rather embarrassingly, I tend to feel towards retired former designs the way I miss the My Little Pony toy salon my mum accidentally gave away to charity when I was five (it was something like this, but not nearly as hideous). Its obsolescence inevitable, of course, yet I would still keep it today if I could, stored away for sake of memory with the other childhood relics I dare not name… However one significant touch-up is on the table, and without delving into this Freudian analysis any further, my question is this: should I do away with the masthead, the one thing remaining untouched since this site’s conception three years ago? Does it now appear to be old and weary? You’ve probably already noticed the changes in reading length format (consequently reducing the search return limit to one entry per page) and the absence of the mile-long archival list and blogroll. But feng-shuing too much might actually achieve the opposite of what the UI is for, namely make it easier to browse and dig for older, perhaps relevant posts. So if any of what you see doesn’t work for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch — especially if you’re an IE user, because editing in Firefox leaves minor gaps for coding in 2.7 to get lost in translation, and those are easy to miss if left unchecked… Now back to work!
Sarah Badr © MMIX
See also: ‘Site overhaul’ (pieces at random)
sarah badr | pieces at random 
One thought on “Masthead dilemma”