Even though I was running a slight fever, I took the day off to whip up a quick redesign of my home page at Raquedan.com. I’ve alwas intended the site to be my sandbox for new web development techniques and experimentation in design but this new version of the site marks a maturation of sorts in my design sensibilities.

I finally implemented most of the usability and web standards stuff that I’ve been advocating these past few years.  If you look at the old versions of my home page (version 1 and version 2), you will notice that I put a premium on “The Concept,” the thing that spurred me for that particular design. But the new one I just did is a lot more subdued and understated. Simplicity was my concept here.

I also did that page in less than a day (design & development included) and pure hand-coding on my text editor (I think I would have finished this a lot faster in Dreamweaver), thanks to CSS and XHTML. The site is so simple that it passes all the validators you can think of (well, that’s an exaggeration ) but more than that, I’m glad it passes my personal standards.