Move the Markets, a Pictorial History

This post sure has a lot of verbiage for a so-called ‘pictorial’ history! Oh well… too late to change it now. I thought it’d be fun to capture pictures of the site’s past themes, while I can still find examples. This might well only be interesting to me (like people with photos of their children, I guess). Deal with it!

June 2006

Here we have the first blog theme I did. Like all my themes, I started out with a theme I found on the net, and modified it.

I remember completely changing the way the theme was put together, in terms of the CSS, because so many people had trouble rendering the three columns properly. Finally, I gave up on CSS, and actually went to a table-based layout. *shiver* Going to tables meant that the left sidebar comes first in the html file, which supposedly makes it harder for search engines to tell what your page is about (because they give more importance to the “top” of the file).

November 2006

By November, the situation here at Move the Markets had changed quite a bit. I was getting regular submissions from Zoomie, and someone named ExEngineer was coming on board (wonder what happened to him?). I was also getting a lot of comments making it obvious that people were unaware that more than one person wrote on the site. So, I wanted a layout that:

• Made it more obvious that there were multiple authors.
• Better displayed more posts per day.
• Looked different… I was tired of the old look.

Again, starting from an existing multi-author theme, I created this:

I think it’s funny to this day that the graphic at the top (which I created out of flames and shattered glass and a few effects in Corel Painter) has nothing whatsoever to do with finance or stocks. No one ever commented on that, though.

So, the 2-column format allowed me to go back to CSS and still have the page content “first” in the html. After the first couple posts (displayed in wordpress’ horrid summary form), I presented only post titles. This way, many more posts could be easily browsed from the home page. In some ways, this should have been the perfect site layout… but I just never really enjoyed it.

So…

January 2007

By January, I was tired of all the bright orange colors and fancy web-2.0-ish icons beside everything. I set out to design a much more austere theme. Some of you may recall that my first attempt was in muted lavender/purple tones. It was unusual, but I kind-of like unusual. However, so many people complained that I changed it to stronger reds+grays the next day.

I think I got what I wanted, at the time. It was plain, simple, and to the point. This was also when I introduced tagging to posts, and the resultant tag cloud and “related posts” features.

August 2007

While the previous design was very successful, it was time for a change.

• It always bothered me that it rendered slightly differently on IE vs Firefox.
• Sometimes I wrote long articles that looked ridiculous in that little fixed-width column.
• I had been looking at that design for 7 months.
• I got a request to accomodate Firefox-style text scaling, and I would rather undergo serious dental work than try to adjust the CSS for a multi-column blog.

So, this time I thought… What can I do that I don’t see any other bloggers doing?… widgets and web-2.0 tie-ins are all the rage… sometimes I go to a blog and there’s so much stuff there that my eyes have trouble locking on to the actual content. That’s not an exaggeration.

I drew a line in the sand… 1 column! All content, no spectacle! Then, the question became: how to somehow still retain what is useful in all that sidebar stuff? The answer is not yet clear… it will be interesting to see what evolves out of this, and how far that will go until the next re-design. :-)

Update: April 2008

Having gotten tired of the 1-column layout, and having jettisoned the guest authors on the blog, I thought it might be fun to go to a more standard setup. There is a lot to be said about having a “normal” blog theme. How long will it last? Time will tell…

This is the theme I’ve modified the least prior to going live. I changed so little that I even left the link to the original theme’s author in the footer.