About This Site

This is my playground

More than a Re-design, this site exists as a playground for me to tinker with modular layouts, responsive design and to experiment with html5 and CSS3.

For a few years, this site has been a simple place for me to through out samples of work, and personal notes. Different themes were used as a way to refresh the look without slowing me down. The version you are viewing today is the first version of jeffrummel.com that was designed by Jeff Rummel. It was built on the backbone of the wonderful html5 reset theme, with too many modifications to count.

HTML5 & CSS3

Web designers and developers know html5 and CSS3 are the future. It will take a while for the w3c to adopt it as a standard, but as browser manufacturers and the needs of users refuse to wait for that standardization to take affect, it’s not easy for me to sit idly by knowing there is a more semantic way of defining and delivering content. I have had a few sites on my local server for months, but there really is no fun in that. I wanted to test-drive it, put a site built in html5 and CSS3 out into the world, see how it handles.

Responsive Design

Hell yeah it’s responsive! Responsive web design has been the most liberating technique to evolve in our industry. It’s right there in the name, responding to the users needs has always been the driving force behind what we do. The responsive approach is not a one-size fits all, but for blogs and many publishing sites, it is the only way to go. Fast, cost-effective, and the responsive approach encourages us to be extremely targeted and focused when planning a site.

Publishing Experiment

Originally inspired by Jason Santa Maria‘s post Making Modular Layout SystemsI had tinkered with a modular system for creating multi-column layouts, but I never had the opportunity to actually use them in the wild. With this site I created a 16 column layout that degrades gracefully for smaller screens. If you are reading this on a desktop or netbook, you are reading an article that has more in common with print publishing, while the small screen version allows for easy reading in a single column.