I’ve updated the template for my blog - I’m starting with this, and will be tweaking it over time. Thanks to styleshout for posting some good free templates! It makes a world of difference to me to have a good starting point vs. starting from scratch. Especially in terms of the amount of time it takes to come up with a high quality page design.

My next steps are going to be streamlining the images used (I’ve already chopped the rediculously large header graphic down quite a bit), iconifying a few things, and converting to a different color scheme.

After living in Windows Forms (desktop applications) development for a while, I’m really starting to miss web development! I was never great at the design aspect, but I certainly enjoyed it. Jeff Atwood is right on the money - developers should learn at least some design skills. I learned how to use Photoshop back in college where I worked part-time at the campus Educational Technology Center. I had a great pseudo-mentor, Ben Mahan, who was a great designer who could also program. One of the rare ones, if you ask me. I really think my Photoshop “skillz” have made a huge difference in my development career. They helped me land my first job. They help me mock up UI prototypes anytime I need to. And, in my previous job (which coincidentally was my first job ) they let me enter contests while I waited for my boss to approve us to actually do some work. Check out my stats page. Here are my two pride and joys from the Worth1000 contests. The 1st was for a contest relating to oversized animals (I placed third), and the 2nd was for a contest relating to fake news stories (I got first). Once I got my current job, though, I actually have fun work to do, and haven’t gone back to enter any photoshop contests again.

(click the pictures to see the full size versions)

1. mike Says:
   August 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

   Hey, I remember those pics. Ah, those were the days… when we had free time at work to do stuff like that

2. April Says:
   August 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

   “skillz”??

3. aaron Says:
   August 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

   Nope, I’ve gone with Quality Host Online for a while now and like them plenty. They’re super cheap–I don’t generate enough traffic for it to be a problem–and they have all the features I need.

   I’m still using Blogger, and by the way it was fun converting the template to use the blogger tags, etc.

4. Jeff Moser Says:
   August 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

   Nice new look! Did you also switch hosts from Google to ThePlanet as well?