Stroep » Stroep

Updated design – Cleaner and less ads

Mark Knol — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:56:30 +0000

What a nice title! I have updated my blog design. No, there are no shocking new features, just a more fresh and more cleaner design. Yes, it is still black and in the ‘stroep’-style, but I think it is really a little bit better. I think it is important too keep improving, so I hope you like it. I added some nice icons in the sidebar and jQuery rollovers. I have added rounded corners (only shown in modern browsers) and I really think it makes the site more friendly, which should be a good thing

For all guys who use IE6, I have added a nice message for you. You cannot see my site anymore. It’s not a personal thing, but I really think this year we should all ban old crappy browsers. It would not take long till I show this message for IE7 too and some other out-dated browsers too. Let us update and enjoy fast modern browsing with new possibilities.

I have removed more Google ads from the blog. There were some ads between the posts and on the post-page. Now I have only 1 banner at the bottom of the sidebar. Yes; I have 2000 unique visitors in a month and no; I don’t earn a lot money with it, so basically the ads are useless. I dislike banners too, but still I hope to have a big hit one day and my ad is ready to be clicked (kidding) For real; one day I had the illusion I could be rich by placing these ads on my blog. But I’ve realized most people on my blog are looking for products, but looking for sources and inspiration. This site doesn’t target banner-clicking-people. I hope you are happy with it.

Happy Birthday Stroep

Mark Knol — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:00:06 +0000

This was the first hello world post on blog.stroep.nl. I’m very proud to blog for more than a year, but tomorrow is my real birthday

Stroep – New design

Mark Knol — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:13:40 +0000

Almost 1 year since my first post. I already updated my blog to a newer WordPress installation. But since my design was getting older, I was tired looking at it. It looks a little bit messy. I think the layout (top nav, left content, right sidebar) interacts nice; so I keep this layout. But the design was a little bit overdone and I was not totally happy and I hacked multiple times layout things to it. More browsers didn’t like my site anymore.

Stroep v1

I just want stroep.nl has to look better.

Last time I downloaded a theme as basic for my design and edited it. First I felt a little bit ashamed doing this. I am a designer and I can design and build my own theme. But.. I don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel of creating themes. So I don’t feel ashamed anymore. I think it’s smart using good templates as start for creating personal(!) blogs. Oops.. I did it again I used this Linetech as start for the design. It’s a great theme. I easily modified it to my stroep-style.
I love the sidebar from my previous design. You can switch between comments/recent post. So I kept this principle. I pimped my tag-cloud too. It has random colors. Don’t ask me why; I think it just looks cool and I never seen it before too btw. Speaking of random; the header images shows some random art too.

Stroep v2

I always wanted a clean dark layout with art in the header. I found some great wood-patterns. These are great because I really think this patterns make the blog more ‘friendly’ in comparison to a noisy background or a solid dark color. I know dark layouts have downsides; It’s less readable. Well for now I can live with it. The pro of a dark design is it makes art/photography look more beautiful. This blog is mostly about generative art or topics about flash related stuff, so I think its worth giving a dark design a try.

I also removed 2 advertising-blocks, and just added it 1 to the sidebar. Nobody clicks it anyway. So it doesn’t have to break my new layout (yet). If someone wants to have a banner on this site (which has something to do with design/art/programming or related things), just contact me. I have about 1000 visitors a month.

My blog looks better (not perfectly the same) in modern browsers. If you use IE6 you get a nice update message. My philosophy is we all need to stop supporting old crappy browsers and notify unlearned or conservative users. I used transparent PNG’s, rounded corners with CSS, and all without any fix for browsers who doesn’t support it. For my blog I don’t care and to be honest I feel forceful not having to support ‘them’.

Hope you like it! Let me know what you guys think.