It has been long since I wrote here at all, especially about the upcoming fourth version of this website.

Two months ago, a prototype design of the Hypro theme for Powervortex.4 was completed. A preview can be found here. Unfortunately, I had to completely ditch this design for now and return to the proverbial drawing board.

Why? For a couple reasons.

1. My current site layout is too bloated and unnecessarily confusing. I mean, the various parts of the “main site” and having the blog on the side somewhat makes sense…but what the heck is up with the “gallery?” The site layout is too un-streamline.
2. Too much text. Everything on this site is pretty much text-based. This is the past. Looking at various other websites, namely Apple.com, websites today are much more visual. And I call myself a web/graphics designer. =D
3. The HTML/CSS/images currently are too heavyweight. On slower connections, the myriad images, especially in the blog, take forever to fully load. And the header strips on the content boxes are hard to read without the background images loading.
4. Hypro, the working title of the prototype PV.4 theme shown above does not at all fix any of the aforementioned problems with this site. More importantly, and more unfortunately, I one day opened the HTML in Internet Explorer and was shocked at how poorly the layout was rendered in IE (I’ll upload a screenshot someday). It displays fine under both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers like Safari and Konqueror, but it is butchered by IE.

As a result, I give you:

Mayfield is the name for the (second) new theme for the fourth version of Powervortex. It will be more minimal, simpler, and will focus on being more user friendly. It will present less reading, more seeing, with more visuals and less text. In addition, I will scrap the three-tier main site/blog/gallery site layout with one that makes more sense, is more streamlined, and is less confusing. However, I will not be joining the table-less sect of CSS design. I will continue to use tables until I eventually get a hang of making layouts completely with DIV tags and CSS. Mayfield will forcus on greater usability, a more streamlined experience, and compatibility with all of the popular browsers, including IE.

My April desktop. The wallpaper reminds me of my unexpected visit to Darwin, a ghost town in the desert near Death Valley. The feeling of walking into a town that was once full of life but now is only inhabited by the elements and history is quite powerful.

VS: Royale Vista black
Rainlendar: Lucid Smoked

My March desktop. I decided to call it “Requiem” because of the wallpaper and color scheme and thought that this name would be cool. =D

Anyway:
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition - my fresh install
VS: VistaXP
Rainlendar: Lucid

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Well, I could have thrown a Haiku off of this theme as I did back with the Haiku.autumnal announcement post. But…I’m not going to because I can’t think of anything right now.

Anyway, there it is, the first screenshot of the Haiku.inspired (still considering the product(red) reference) theme. This is the album/subalbum view, the only component complete so far other than the global components. As I did with Haiku.legacy (the Wordpress variant), I code all the HTML/CSS first before doing the PHP work with the application-specific API. ZenPhoto is said to be very themeable but some of the HTML such as for the album listings are a bit complex so let’s hope so it will be ultimately compatible.

~DC

p.s., Yes..I uploaded this screenie on Gallery2 and not the new gallery. The thing is, I still have not found a working and tested Wordpress plugin that allows me to insert ZenPhoto images. I will complete the switch when I find one.