Last time I wrote about the current positioning of design/tech portal sites, and where GUI Galaxy might fit into that mix. That is, where it might fit in if it wasn’t an abandoned concept in excess of 2 years, and if the expired guigalaxy.com domain name wasn’t nabbed by a domain hoarding company. The more I thought about it, though — particularly after that last post — the more I wanted to give the project a shot once more. And so, on a stormy and turbulent evening, I bought guigalaxy.net, set it up with hosting on my server, installed WordPress, and went to town on the approach I had in my head.
The resulting design facet carries over familiar UI elements from the last iteration of the site, so its new positioning (and reintroduction) wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar. New goals included iconic categorization of news types (categories), and making news posts themselves more engaging (graphical). The technical component, utilizing WordPress, facilitated getting the site shell up and running in an insanely streamlined timeframe. I wanted search as a visual constant at all times, so the position is fixed on that header div. For the first time I’m also playing with some channel-based Google ads. I’m going to keep the site off the public radar for a little bit while refinements are still being made.
On the redesign end I gave pseudoroom a fresh face, with a typography-centric approach. I didn’t want to lose the custom field-based display “engine” I had built the site around last iteration, so that was paramount in considering the technical implications of the design. The other less technical …technical… item I wanted to be mindful of was executing the full site typography via CSS; I’ve noticed some sites cheat with .pngs in circumstances where it’s easier to tightly control type display via an alpha-based image.