I’ve been moderately discontent with the website design here for well over a year. One thing I believed the site needed was some actual imagery, and yesterday I came across some nifty PHP code that allowed me to display a randomly selected image.

My first attempt involved just tucking a rectangular image in the upper left corner, and adjusting a few things around it to make it fit. It was a fine bit of geek-fu, but Dawn pointed out what it looked like: an ugly, geeky hack. The layout was completely destroyed by this monstrosity I’d perched on its corner.

After considerable discussion and tinkering and websurfing, I set upon the path to what you see now. I removed the border around the center content. (Internet Exploder never rendered it correctly anyway, showing a thick black border where a grooved grey border should have been.) I extended the center column upward. I added a relatively subtle tiled background to the sides. I created a logo. And then, I put the image rotator code back into service as the background for the page element in which the logo lives. Other bits of tinkering included moving the random tagline and rearranging the navigation columns.

What I have now… ain’t half bad. In fact, I’m quite pleased. A heartfelt “Thank You!” to Dawn for helping me realize this new design!