So I’m “officially” done with the pre-course work for Hack Reactor. Remember that freakout a few posts back? Remember? Because I do and it makes me laugh out loud. I’m still going to work on all of the extra credit bits that they included but I have a month to go and I want to do some stuff I want to do. So here goes the site redesign I said wasn’t coming just a post ago.

While I redesigned this website and finally created my own minimal theme for WordPress I really wanted to learn the new awesome HTML5 tags that I’d only breezed through in the past. My first question was can I have multiple headers? Should I have multiple headers? According to Common HTML5 Mistakes, the answer is no on the “should” part at least.

My next rabbit hole was how those fancy newfangled button thingies work. I thought about using them for my main nav buttons, but after reading some Stack Overflow on Valid Button Uses I decided against it. Instead I just used some block divs.

From there I wanted it to be pretty. I have been reading about usability in web design. I’m starting to understand the Contrast Rebellion. I really want colors/fonts that are easy to read, still a little trendy, and with an eye to the UX vs UI issues.

Some other fun things I used/found useful:

• Adobe Kuler - my color inspiration
• Custom Text Select Color - for the heck of it
• CSS Selectors - more than I remember learning in web design
• WP-Markdown - I’ve started using Markdown and wanted to use it to blog too
• Disqus - much easier comment management
• HTML5 Reset - ridiculously simple wordpress theme with no styling that I hacked to bits