chapter 8: blueflower.org v5.0
(july 2002 to january 2003)

Several years on, this is still one of my favorite blueflower.org designs. It's clean, it's simple, and it's not all blue. In fact, there was no blue used for version 5.0. Instead, it was all orange, gray, and white. I switched to this design when I switched to using Movabletype as of July 21, 2002.

Liking that logo I had employed on the side of the last version, I put it to use on the top of this version, but now in orange.

Tired of my pages not displaying correctly on varying browsers, I overdid it with this version. The design was very tightly controlled making extensive use of tables to control the display. It worked (mostly), but the coding ended up being more complex than it really needed to be.

I finally gave in and came to terms with the fact that my weblog was not the biggest part of my website, it WAS my website. As a result, I did away with a front page and finally made the weblog the front page. With the switch to MT, I also introduced comments for the first time.

Below the navigation menu at the top of the page appeared random black-and-white photographs. When this version was first introduced, I was still living in Minneapolis, so the photos were of various spots around town there. I moved back to Appleton in September, so I then switched to random photos of Appleton instead. Using black-and-white photos added a little flair without detracting from the main content of the website.

Overall, I was very happy with the simple-and-clean aesthetic and wish I would have employed it more often in later designs.

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