something new. . .
December 26th, 2008 | 
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Happy Christmas everyone! I hope you had a great day yesterday and are enjoying the extended vacation. The picture above is of my new hand crafted little clay Rockpool. It was made for me using what I had left over of some repair color & glitter so interestingly it’s an exact match of my Alaw Bach. The first question I asked was, “How do I take it apart??”.
As Christmas passes we tend to start looking toward the new year and at the same time looking back and the past. I’m sure I’ll write more about those ideas in the coming days but for the moment I thought I’d spend some time updating KayakQuixotica. Sometimes you do updates to better organize information and sometimes for no other reason than to freshen up a bit. In this case I’m doing both. Hopefully a slight change in layout will help those of you new to the website find the “non-blog” info such as the rolling videos, galleries, and general “learning” information. I also wanted to get back a bit of uniqueness to the layout as well.
In addition the new layout can sort information out a bit by allowing me to feature selected expeditions, sponsors and such on the homepage and move more content into separate sections. This is what I’ll be working on over the next few weeks. So if something looks sort of screwy it’s probably because I’m fussing with something! So as they say in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts!”
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Hi Derrick congratulations with the new look,i’ll go thhru it to get used to it,happy holidays to you.
Hey Karel, let me know if anything jumps out at you. I’m sure there are glitches all over the place. I’ve actually got quite a bit to work on in the “lower levels” of the site but I needed it online so I could see a few of the changes and how they worked.
Like the new look. Miss the kayaking-related news articles from all over. It was good to get a regular dose of news stories about missing kayakers, daring rescues, and the like. Maybe I just haven’t found them yet on the redesigned site.
Hi,
Yeah, I’ve added the stories back in. The hard part is filtering them enough to make them relevant and not a bunch of junk. Speaking of which I’ll have a new feature up soon that will let readers submit news stories they thing should be on the site.
Way back then when the search engines were warring the google was the cleanest meanest interface. Not only the visual layout, but the code as well.
Love this site, but it is getting bloated by visual garbage. I am not going to count visual transitions on this page alone – different fonts, different colors, different frame transitions, very busy background.
Anyways, congratulations on the new look!
Hey Marius,
I hear you. There are two directions I think things are going. The “Google” direction of simplicity is great. Well, on the homepage, but once you get into the search there is content everywhere. And the other way IS content everywhere. . Huntington Post, Washington Times or whatever all pack info in every corner. I read too about CNN’s changes to adapt to the “ADD” world of the next generation who generally scan and click. So the more headlines the better, in that they will scan and click off to where they want to go without being too concerned about the noise factor.
For my part I’m trying to balance things. I have the blog, but I also have other info. I also bring in some feeds and links and such as well. All that stuff takes up space, and different people like different elements while others would like less. It’s tricky, no doubt. I’m certainly aware that I break some design rules here and there, and that’s simply a choice for good or bad and behind the scenes I’m still modifying to this day.