Oh my god!

After months and months of draw­ing and cod­ing, This Is Star has a new look!

I’ve been doing a lot of code and design on other people’s web­sites for the past cou­ple months, and it occurred to me that a new look on my own site was way over­due.
The pre­vi­ous design had been stand­ing strong for just over 2 years, and I knew it was more than time for a change.

The new site has some neat fea­tures that I’ll share with you now.

Cus­tom Cat­e­gory Headers

I designed the site to skin the head­ers of var­i­ous posts, by cat­e­gory.
This way, when I make an audio post, it calls a header illus­tra­tion with a cello bow and a micro­phone.
I have sim­i­lar head­ers for sev­eral dif­fer­ent types of posts, and plan on adding more as my col­lec­tion of post top­ics grows.

I was inspired by the man­ner in which sites like Tum­blr aut­o­for­mat your posts by type, and I wanted to do some­thing sim­i­lar on my site, which is word­press based.
Chang­ing the header back­ground dynam­i­cally by cat­e­gory seemed like the sim­plest way for me to get this feel with­out going overboard.

Fun with JavaScript

See­ing as I’ve grown a lot as a devel­oper in the time that has gone by since I did my last site design, I thought I should show off some of my newer skills.
One of those skills is using JavaScript, which has become much more sim­ple and dynamic in recent years thanks to the rise of libraries like JQuery and YUI.

I used JQuery on my site to make a few neat effects that I’ll show you here:

If you click on one of the “Adver­tise Here” but­tons on the right hand side, you’ll notice that the infor­ma­tion on pur­chas­ing ad space on the site expands below the ads.
This allows me to dis­play the infor­ma­tion with­out adding an unnec­es­sary extra page, or allow­ing the user to nav­i­gate away from the main content.

If you hover over my logo on the top left, you’ll see that it ani­mates slightly.
The lovely logo is, of course, designed by the equally lovely Nubby Twiglet.

You’ll also notice that all my archive pages and cat­e­gories will expand using a col­laps­ing menu.
This is pow­ered by Col­laps­ing Archives, and Col­laps­ing Cat­e­gories plu­g­ins, respectively.

Dynamic Footer

A web design trend I’ve seen pop­ping up a whole lot lately is putting lots of dynamic con­tent for social net­work­ing in your footer.
I really like the look of these big foot­ers anchor­ing everyone’s pages, so I decided to do my own ver­sion, inte­grat­ing design ele­ments from my cat­e­gory head­ers, as well as the site header.

I hope all of you like the new site design as much as I do!