I’ve been so engrossed with fixing this layout that for the first time in weeks, I slept at nearly 4am. 
I decided a new layout is necessary not because I was bored of the previous one but because I think I need something new to “freshen up” the entire site. This blog hasn’t been very active lately because most of my time had been spent on last minute revisions for the upcoming examinations. I had a few other ideas for the new layout but the “Candy House” idea was my final pick.
New icons
Frequent visitors of my blog would know that I usually don’t change any of the comments design because I’m always at a lack of ideas (okay, I admit I’m lazy). This design is one of the simpler ones without much details. I didn’t have much time on hand to work on this. The entire layout took me about 6 hours and I didn’t do any detailed cross browsers checks either. I did a quick check in Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. It seems all right hence if you notice any issues, please let me know. 
Panda King
Regarding this design, I have to admit I’m not a fan of candies or chocolates. Anything sweet is not exactly my cup of tea. However, I thought a candy house seems pretty interesting and I’m pretty sure it’s a cosy place to live in. This design is made from lollipops, colourful chocolate M&Ms, strawberries and chocolate sticks, vanilla cream, lots of melted chocolates and my trademark, panda king. No pandas were harm in the process of making this layout. 
I hope you like it because it’s going to stay till at least April or June.
I’ve also been thinking of ideas for my blogger’s namecard. It’s been on my list of to-do for the past year but I still haven’t started yet. Perhaps I should start jotting down my ideas. What do you think of using this candy design for the namecard? Oh and if both of you are reading this, Terry and Brenda, both of you need to start too! I want one when you are done, okay? 
To celebrate Christmas this season, I have launched a new layout – Zoo Mania. I wasn’t lazy this time and drew the illustration from scratch in Photoshop. Perhaps this is to make up for the previous layout where I dump everything from my old layouts together. Zoo Mania took me around 4 hours to draw the illustration and another 4 hours to code it. Did I mention how much I dislike coding layouts? Drawing is a really enjoyable process but coding is totally the opposite. The debugging process is a headache as well.
Even though you can’t see major changes in the style, I did changed the header styles. I left the comments, page navigation and footer untouched because I like it as it is now. I swear I wasn’t trying to be lazy. Before I introduce the main characters of this layout, I would like to thank Scholar for giving me constructive criticism and advice on how to improve this illustration.
Edit on 24 November: I ended up editing the minor style details like the page navigation, read more links, comments navigation and the footer etc because I feel that the previous styles didn’t really match the new theme. It’s more colourful now and looks like a new theme.
Continue reading "New layout for Christmas – Zoo Mania"
I’m still alive and kicking in case anyone though I’ve gone missing. I’m extremely slow in replying to emails these days because I’m busy catching up with my “offline” life. I faced my computer nearly 24 hours a day except when I’m in school. My dad even told me I could just get married to the computer. Of course I’m not going to do that. Chewy wouldn’t like that. Chewy came over for dinner and he waited 3 hours while I messed around with the new navigation today (yes, there’s a new design, did you not noticed it?). Hence, I promise I will spend my entire Wednesday with him!
Mini layout redesign
Speaking of the redesign, I redid both the main and footer navigation and added new panda prints to the footer. I noticed I’ve been using rounded corners for my layouts since last December and thus I removed all the round corners as well. Check out the new post meta at the end of every post if you have not. I’ve also switched to a new plugin for sharing posts and redesign (again!) the list of tags, related and popular posts. In addition, I make a small change to the background of the header, no more fluffy white clouds now and it’s a lot less cluttered. Phew! Yes, that’s all the updates I’ve in regards to the layout.
Voting for the Site Glamour Contest has closed and all the articles written by the wonderful participants have been published here. Please feel free to leave any comments or join in the discussion.
