Out Of My Tree

Colour schemes.  They do so very much suck.

As well as my own recent blog theme horror issue crisis nightmare I am also redesigning the website of the Scout Group I am involved with.  I have been trying to get the other people in the group interested in it but I have the old problem that the ones who are interested are too busy and everyone else is, well, not.

Professional web designers, graphic designers and people who know what they are talking about when it comes to this stuff?  My respect to you all.

Now my biggest problem at the moment is the colours that the Scout Association uses.  They are lovely and go well with each other in their various logos and pages.  So the colours I want to use are the Scout Association ones

and the colours which our group uses for our logo

They go so very well together and without making anyone’s eyes bleed this becomes quite difficult.  Of course I could keep the brightness to a minimum and have another natural colour dominate the screen but I have to get kid’s to want to come to the site as well… and that means bright and shiny, right?  But that bright and shiny = goofy?  And the last thing I want is for the scout’s website to look goofy.  I also don’t want this to be a site (like this horror) that needs updating every 20 minutes to keep me interested.  I just want to get it done and then have to do nothing to it for at least a year… other that to add to it… obviously.

Because of the almost paranoid way we have to be about the information we will be carrying everything has to be inhouse.  Instead of hosting all the pictures on Flickr like most of us do to save space and the like it’ll be all here.  It’ one of the reasons I am on the hunt for a cheap and usable hosting site that doesn’t limit SQl and gives enough space to be usable…  Let’s put it like this.  I have added one picture in so fr (other than the them-y stiff) and I’m already at 74.6MB… Yep, this is going to be weighty.  Obviously not as fat as this blog but… well, this has been running for less than a year, most of the pics are on Flickr and still this is at… oh 51.89MB.  Well, that just blows my crap all over the water. Ignore that bit about my blog.

Oh but when you add in all the photos and videos and audio and pdf’s and blah blah blah that is going to be added in (hopefully) weekly it’s going to go way way way over the 50MB one site offers and is going to kick around the 100MB wihin no time at all.  Sigh.  I just want it to work like ‘Tree does – simply, easily, with no muss, no fuss.  Yes, I am using Wordpress for it.  For two reasons – it’s easy to use and I’m too lazy to learn anything else.  I think I am beginning to understand Wordpress finally – the plugins that are useful vs the ones that are just tinsel, the things that make it truly great.  Of course, I still can’t write PHP, or CSS or any of the useful stuff but I can modify someone else’s code.

Yesterday I tried to follow a step by step for building your own theme and I failed at the first hurdle.  But after going through a lot of theme sites and downloading a fair old number that looked pretty I finally found two I liked.  I am now modifying the crap out of them for both here and the scout site and then seeing which I like better.  Oh, the reason I am not keeping the current design for this place is simple.  I don’t like it.  I don’t know why.  It’s just a no.

I really wish I understood why IE hated the one from before..