Finding inspiration for a new mistersugar.com

Dec 20, 2011

As things slow down for the holidays — ScienceOnline2012 planning notwithstanding — I’m going to take some time to rework the design of mistersugar.com. This site has had the same design since 2006, and web design has gone through quite a few trends since.

I’ve spent the past few months monitoring Wordpress themes and site templates, at WooThemes (we use the Canvas theme for MedicineNews and the Kaboodle theme for ScienceOnline2012.com), ThemeForest and others — mostly lots of portfolio sites and sliders and same-looking business pages.

I’ve also seen quite a few blogs going the simple way: inessential.com and marco.org and CarpeAqua and Zero Distraction are reduced to a single column of text.

Anil Dash also has a simple blog — like the others listed above, he’s a great writer and a thought leader to follow – on which he spotlighted Bootstrap, a design toolkit for rapid site development. See his post Bootstrap Rising. A similar framework is Foundation by Zurb.

Last week, I played a bit with TypeKit and adjusted the fonts of my blog. In the next week or two, I hope to rework the site on Bootstrap.

I’m also experimenting with Dave Winer’s Radio2 minimal blogging tool for running a linklog. I’ve run both my blog and my Sugarcubes linklog with Textpattern, but Radio2 might help me better coordinate my linklog and the links I share on Twitter. I’ve got Radio2 and OPML Editor mostly figured out; just need to find the way to point a subdomain to Radio2.

So, anyway, as I move into my 12th year of blogging, I’m excited to revamp the site. Stay tuned.

Anton Zuiker ☄