What, drawn, and talk of trends! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. Well OK a little over the top, but Shakespeare sure knew how to rant. On one of my all-too-frequent visits to SimpleBits I noticed that Dan had decided to tear things apart and do a live redesign. This approach leaves the website styleless or incomplete in the process. Most people choose to develop the website in private, then through slight of hand replace the old site with the new one seamlessly. Some wish to criticize this approach and others wish to follow the trend. It reminds me of computer game release delays. Everybody complains when a game is delayed but, when John Carmack delayed Doom 3 by 12 months there was no complaint. You don't doubt someone like John Carmack and you don't doubt someone like Dan Cederholm.
Soon there were plenty of people following the trend. I had been considering this approach for quite some time but was unsure if I should. Then I thought, if Dan can do it so can I. But now it's a trend, I have a natural opposition to trends. I decided that I should put aside my feud with trends and do as I intended for the sake of the website.
Like Bryan Veloso and Mark Hadley, I'm using the Sandbox theme as a starting point as it is semantically sound and already comes with built-in Microformat support. It's likely that I will completely rewrite the markup though as I'm rather particular about my semantics.
There are some changes behind the scenes as well with Wordpress being updated, plugins changed, file structure changed, etc. So expect breaks to links and pages for a little while as I go through and fix them. The redesign will take place over a longish period of time and I'll try to blog about all aspects of the change. So basically my CSS Refresh is back on.
