Site design

I'm working on a site for one-shore, and have wasted a few days on design, but I don't know if I like it. I started with the idea of using a picture of a "shore." Here is my concept drawing:

I wasted a lot of time looking through photos on stock photo sights, flickr, and google images, but couldn't find anything quite right. I looked through a bunch of my travel photos and settled on one -- a sunset somewhere in Fiji:



It's not perfect but it'll have to do for now. Alternately I'd like a wave rolling from right to left or a smooth rock beach. Maybe have a series of images rotate like banner ads.

Getting rounded corners was a nice web 2.0 touch, and I found a cool trick with CSS on SpiffyCorners.



I decided a black background works better for the image:



Putting one rounded corner div inside another gave me the outline effect here:



I discovered with relative position -2 I could get it thinner on one side, but then it'd be thicker on the other:



Finally I figured out how to get it only 3 pixels wide, by interleaving the first 2 elements of the inner rounded box with the latter:



That took a full day. Now I'm working on the layout of the rest of the page. I was so proud of my rounded corners that I wanted to use them everywhere:



But now I'm thinking less is more. Too many corners is too "cute" and I want to look more "serious."




I'm still not sure about the black background, especially since the wiki and other tools will be a major part of the site, and it will be jarring to change. Next I'll try to turn this into a wordpress theme.