When I designed the last incarnation of SelfCentEnt, I had the best of intentions. “Ooh, look, a button here! You also need this button over HERE. And a THIRD button for those of you that missed the first two!” as I tried to please every user and find a spot for the information that might appeal specifically to them. As the site aged and more stuff was tacked onto the design, it turned into a hot mess. There was no focus on content hierarchy. There was distracting background imagery. It looked kinda cool at a glance but from a functionality standpoint, it was a friggin’ nightmare.

Which brings me to this site. The old site’s WordPress theme folder was 26 megabytes. When I uploaded this new site folder last night, it clocked in at 450 kilobytes. The name of the game with this new site is “spartan”. I wrote as much as possible in CSS3 to avoid using images anywhere (there are only a handful of site theme images on the site now… around ten in total). That means no more Internet Explorer 8 support. Sorry, but if you use IE8 and find this site impossible to navigate, I don’t have much to say past “go find a browser that uses post-2005 technology”. I spend large portions of my day job working out the nightmare rendering that is IE8. I’m not going to do it on my comic site any longer.

You’ve probably noticed that the navigation on this site is a little… unusual. Over the past several years, I’ve become super-frustrated with the “nav goes on top, then you scroll, then you scroll some more” nature of the web. The most important content is at the top of the screen but then to progress down the content, you lose access to that ever-important navigation and site map content. It’s illogical. Then there’s the widescreen monitor. You can’t walk into a store and buy a square monitor these days; every computer and laptop comes with a widescreen 16:10 or 16:9 ratio monitor. That means most of us look at a website that covers about 2/3rds (or less) of the screen real estate, with several hundred pixels of nothing hanging off the left and right sides of the content. Again, illogical. So, I took advantage of that left-hand dead space and put a permanent navigation bar there. By moving the nav bar to the left, it also allows me to add extra features that are on-hand at all moments. Right now, that space is dedicated to social media and sharing pages on the site. In the future, that could become a dynamic bit of content that is specialized for each page… I have ideas, I just need to decide which direction to go with those ideas. In any case, I feel that permanently affixing navigation and special elements to the left and leaving the top of the screen open to content presents the user with a superior experience than the “traditional” method of site layout. Time will tell if users agree.

And you’ll notice a mysterious “Aurorae” logo on the site. That’s a new project. I’ve been working on it for the past few months and I’m in the middle of plotting out a rather detailed outline (currently at 16 pages, sure to grow from there). I have several concept sketches done and more will be revealed about that in time. Check back soon to see the first roughs of the concept art. The style is radically different than Variables; to create a more light-hearted environment, I’ve loosened up my art a bit and skewed more in the direction of cartoon/comic. It’s not exaggerated and simplified as much as, say, Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series, but it’s definitely more in that direction than Variables. More to come on that soon.

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