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October 05, 2004

Welcome to the new MovableStyle!

If you are seeing this, the transition to the new look has been completed!

I've spent my free time for the last month or so creating this new design and getting Movabletype all set up to serve the new pages. There have been a huge number of changes that I've made and I'll try to highlight them all below.

New Design

I've worked hard on a new design for the site, and I think it turned out pretty well! I wasn't happy with the way the old site was always changing as the user viewed new styles. To still have the style switching capability I have created 2 "Test Sites" as I like to call them. One for MT 2.x styles/templates and one for MT 3.x. I think these will help the users to view the styles that they want, but still allow me to have a strong look and feel for the main site.

Individual Style Posts

Instead of textual links like I was doing in the past, I have taken screen shots of all the stylesheets as they are seen on the test sites. To view any of these styles on a test site you can simply click the large or small images that you will see around the site, and you will be taken over to the test site. You can quickly tell MT2 style posts from MT3 posts as there will be a small border in blue and orange respectively. And you will always be able to find the last 3 styles that were added at the top of the main page.

View all the Styles Quickly

In the side bar you can quickly view all the styles for your preferred version of Movabletype by selecting the appropriate category archive. At the bottom there is a also link to let you view all the styles by their small thumbnail as well.

As you can see there have been a huge number of changes, hopefully they are for the better. Please let me know what you think of the changes by posting a comment here. Seeing as the site is being ported over like this, you may get the odd broken link or error message. You can let me know about those too :)

Hope you all enjoy the new MovableStyle!

» Comments Dasme » October 5, 2004 09:31 AM

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Comments

  1. Comments Kyle says:

    Hey, the site is online! :-)

    Posted on October 5, 2004 10:03 AM

  2. Comments Rosemarie says:

    The new layout looks GREAT, although I liked the old way of how it could change according to the style yo u wanted to download.

    It was fun.

    But that doesn't take away from the excellentness of the design you have now =)

    Fantastic.

    Posted on October 5, 2004 11:05 PM

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    The new MovableStyle.com looks great and has a few nice looking mt3 styles.... [Read More]

    Tracked on October 6, 2004 07:55 AM

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    MovableStyle! if you want to style your MT weblog.... [Read More]

    Tracked on October 6, 2004 10:29 AM

  5. Comments Carla says:

    I've loving the new layout. I tell people to come here all the time to check out your styles. Keep up the good work.

    Posted on October 6, 2004 02:31 PM

  6. Comments Karl Elvis says:

    While you did a great job with the new style, I have to say, I liked the old look better.

    Here's why.

    I want to be able to see with a click what you have for download on your live site. I can't download this fine looking new template. If you're not using your own templates, why should I be?

    Don't get me wrong. It looks great. But I think it's the wrong concept for a site that's all about clean, downloadable style sheets to be front-ended with something other than those style sheets.

    Which won't stop me from linking to you and sending people your way.

    Posted on October 7, 2004 09:52 AM

  7. Comments Dasme says:

    Karl,

    Thanks for the comments. I thought long and hard about the redesign for the same reasons that you’ve outlined here. For the longest time I had a feeling that something was *wrong* with the site, but couldn't put my finger on it. I tried coming up with a style for the site as a whole and that’s when something clicked, that was what was giving me the odd feeling.

    I also realized that many people would liked the way the old site was made, so I created the test blogs. These test sites operate exactly the same way the old main page did.

    Hopefully my switching things around here won’t cost me any visitors though. I feel that the new look gives MovableStyle an identity that was missing before, hopefully everyone will get used to the new look without too much difficulty.

    That being said, are there any suggestions for this main site or the test blogs that you would have? Anything that I could do to bring back the usability I had before?

    Posted on October 7, 2004 11:12 AM

  8. Comments Arvind says:

    I forgot to congratulate you on this new style. It is marvelous, very well done indeed. Very professional. Great Work !

    Posted on October 12, 2004 09:40 AM

  9. Comments Lola says:

    Looks great! Will you be doing 3 column layouts for MT3? I like to have to columns available for links, calendars, etc.

    Posted on October 12, 2004 09:43 AM

  10. Comments Dasme says:

    Lola, I'm not planning on doing any 3 column layouts right now. The default movabletype templates would not support it, and it would be hard to fake it with css. It's a good idea though! I may have to work on something like that for a future update.

    Posted on October 12, 2004 02:08 PM

  11. Comments Lola Lee says:

    Take a look at my blog - it does have 3 columns (right now I'm working on updating the style sheet from my 2.x incarnation to work with the current 3x index templates - so it looks funny right now . . . click on Comment and you'll see how it is supposed to look like). Learning Movabletype has a good article on converting to a 3 column format, and Movalog has hints on updating a 2x stylesheet to 3x stylesheet.

    Posted on October 16, 2004 08:36 AM

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    online poker Online ematrix catalog full of poker material. Hope this will help.

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