So a month or so back I decided my site needed a bit of a face-lift. Thus, at that point I gathered together what resources I could gather, created a test directory, and started mashing away at a new look. And today I present the first look for the new Austrian Alex site – with theme adequately named “Simplistic Matters”.

So what’s new in this theme?

• A LOT of new optimizations in the CSS code and image files, making the site load faster.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance for all pages, along with validated CSS
• A more professional template with a more simplistic view. Easy to read and standardized.
• Wider layout – optimizing screen real-estate for those bigger monitors.
• No more wide column layout. All pages have a sidebar which simplifies navigation.
• Various bug fixes with coding and images.
• A new logo. That’s actually readable. YAY.
• And some other things I can’t think of at the moment.

All in all the site turned out to be somewhat decent and the web designing part of my head has been fed. The design is not done yet, as I have a few more things in terms of bordering and coloring to add. Gray is good, but it’d be nice to add some vector art here and there and get away from everything rectangular. Or not; it all depends, but I put up a beta version of this template anyways.

So if you’d like to, tell me what you think of the new layout and any improvements you might suggest.

On another note, the gallery template has not been changed, so it’s still using the same old layout. This will be my next item to fix up.

And for further news, I am planning on destroying the Windows Vista OS I am currently running this server on (yeah, you’re probably looking at your monitor in complete shock, but it works great with Apache…) and switching over to some version of Ubuntu (there, happy now? No, I won’t switch over to server software because I need a desktop platform to actually do work at work ). This will happen as soon as I obtain an external hard drive to back up data and such on this computer. There will probably be a day or so of “downtime” (I will move the contents over to another computer and it’ll be hosted there for a while), but I am unsure of the exact date.