I have redesigned this blog, and all of my sites, to give a consistent user experience. Last week I installed some user-tracking software, which has told me that most people are visiting the pages that I spend least time working on. This probably is related to the lack of navigation cues between my sites, and the widely-varying designs of each site.
So, I now have one style sheet in use by all of my sites (even the blog). It should make future redesigns much easier.
The new look was created by combining the "Boxed" blog style from Movable Style with the colours that I was already using for my most recent pages, plus one background image that I was using in my About page, to break up the big swathes of pure colour. Finally, I added some much needed navigation to each page, in the form of tabs. These were from the wonderful sample provided at Unraveled, where all the hard stuff is done once in the style sheet, and the main page just has some list items.
I made three main types of page. A 2-column one, such as for this blog, a single column page of a specific width, such as the genealogy front page, and a single column of variable width, which is used in genealogy sub-pages. These three types cover all of my pages at the moment.
Update (1 day later): I finally got around to checking how well the sites worked in Internet Explorer, and it was a little alarming. I had designed everything using Mozilla Firefox, and I found a couple of minor text sizing issues where IE had decided on a different default. These were easily remedied, with Firefox's DOM Inspector being decidedly useful.
Of more concern was a whopping bug in IE's CSS support, such that many areas of my pages were left blank. I'm still fiddling with various workarounds, but it's appalling that such a destructive bug could be in a released product.
