Lee Clemmer {dot} com

The theme I’m currently using is a slightly hacked version of the default WordPress theme (I changed the header to display my latest mobile picture). Yea it sucks, is ugly, and looks like about 2 million other vanilla WP installs. I don’t want to just use one of the hundreds of available themes out there already (how boring), but make my own again instead (previous ones having been for my former online identity, pixelphantom). Unfortunately, really coming up with something solid takes time, and plenty of it. It seems that there is a correlation between how much time you have (or experience) and how old you are. Suffice it to say that time is not an abundant resource for me, but nonetheless I’ve been thinking about theming my site here again recently. Frankly, I’m getting sick of the look of this. So it’s back to the drawing board.

Back when I was doing this kind of stuff in more earnest about a year ago now, I was still designing with the lowest common denominator in mind: a screen resolution of 800 by 600 pixels. I started out again with this in mind, but quickly found myself a bit frustrated by this self-imposed limitation, so I decided to take a peek at what kind of screen resolutions visitors here have had. This is what Google Analytics showed me:

Yes, you see correctly, not one 800 by 600 screen to be found! Granted, I don’t really have that many visitors (hey Mom!), and some of my other sites do have a sprinkling of this ancient left-over resolution, but you know what, screw ‘em! That’s right, if you’re reading this on a 800 by 600 screen, get a new one! They’re really not that expensive.

So, freed at last, I move on to the next lowest common denominator: 1024 x 768. No, I’m not really a liquid layout fan, I don’t like to follow lines of text across a 1600px width screen, so fixed it is for me (elastic? Meh.)

Speaking of website design, a few designs that I find myself going back to again and again to gawk at (they’re so simple, clean, and elegant): Dave Shea’s mezzoblue, Veerle, and Airbag Industries. So if my design ultimately looks anything like there’s, you can flame me for ripping!