I am currently hard at work on a site-wide redesign! It's going to be big, bold and more colourful! The main colours will still be blue and yellow. The blue is going to be less harsh though.

The new design will be roughly 980 pixels wide. The http://news.bbc.co.uk website has about the same width, to give you an idea. The rationale behind this layout is that it fits snugly into a maximized window on a now-aging 1024 pixels wide desktop. But for the vast majority of visitors who are using higher resolutions, the site will be larger and more comfortable to use.

I don't know how it will work on mobile devices. However since I am redoing the stylesheets from scratch, and the layout will be more consistent throughout the pages, it will be easier to make a stylesheet for the iPhone, for example.

I wanted to post some preview screens to get some feedback but it's difficult to do so because it's an iterative process. I layout a bunch of pages, then go over it several sessions. Since I'm not a designer by trade, I tend to learn by trial and error, so I come back to the same pages again and again to improve the layout until it feels "right". I want to finish the bulk of the pages this week, so I hope I can post some preview screenshots this week-end.

This redesign does not include new functionality but I think it will motivate me to improve the site further. There have been many changes I put off simply because I didn't have the heart to do it on the current layout. Right now I'm enjoying the design process and I can't wait to see the new homepage online!