Welcome to the latest incarnation of Alaeddin’s Blog!

It’s been almost a week since I took the old site down and started working on it. Since this is a major redesign of the old version, taking it down was necessary to maintain consistency between my local and remote version, so I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

This is a snapshot of the old version, which suffered from many problems:

alaeddin_blog_v2

I’ve worked hard on designing this new new version. I spent a couple of days picking out a nice-looking theme from the hundreds of available WordPress themes out there. Then I spent about a week tweaking the theme’s guts until I got something out of it that lives up to my standards and everything I’ve learned about blogging, SEO and web usability so far.

In short, I’ve focused on few key points when tweaking this theme:

  1. Clear, simple and contextual navigation.
  2. Separation of different topics since my blog is quite diverse in nature.
  3. Bringing the content forth and make it easy to read and scan.
  4. Increase the stickiness of the blog (see point 1) and make it easy to subscribe.
  5. Increase the loading speed of the pages.

It’s really been a wonderful (although a bit tiring) experience to unleash the developer in me and let him work out some PHP, XHTML, and CSS magic. Of course, let’s not forget WordPress, the greatest open-source blogging platform ever made.

Having said that, I’m dying now to find out what you guys have to say about my new (vs. old) blog design. Don’t hesitate to be constructively critical, I’ve been known to be one so I naturally expect it from other people. It may also help to know this is still a work in progress so I’m not really emotionally attached to it (OK, maybe just a little bit).

Looking forward to your comments and feedback.