As you must have noticed - unless you're reading this from the RSS feed - I have just finished implementing a new site design. It didn't take as long as I had expected, actually. I started it when I got home yesterday about 5pm, worked on it til about 1am, then spend another three hours or so this morning fixing up all the blog entries to be valid.
I have loosely based the theme on the new MS Office style, or more specifically the "Outlook 2003 Blue" theme for Firefox, and am rather proud of the results. I also took the opportunity to update the whole site to be valid XHTML 1.1 which I have always said to be for masochists only. I do still maintain that it's a pig for certain things (the lack of the "target" attribute of <a> tags, for one, making opening links in new windows somewhat difficult and requiring the use of a JavaScript hack: onclick="window.open(this.href); return false;" onkeypress="window.open(this.href); return false;"), but I now realise that it is actually possible to do things in it. This is also my first successful attempt at designing a website without using tables at all. You can scour this site's code all you like and you will find not a single table. CSS all the way! It's also using valid CSS without even any warnings!
My brief testing has shown that it should work reasonably well on screen resolutions down to 800x600. The side bar becomes partially unusable at that size, though, but 1024x768 should be fine. I did, of course, design it at 1280x1024 but not all that many people are using that yet. It occurs to me that the Google ads are still set to use the old colours so I ought to change that sometime, too.
Don't think there's a whole lot else to write about, so I'll shut up now...