For those of you reading this via the syndication feed, I rolled out a new site design last night. I figured that after three years it was high time for a new site design. Not being much of a designer, I started with the Rounded design template from the ASP.NET Design Template Gallery. It's much cleaner and more readable than my old deisgn, as I've removed all my blogrolls and fixed the width for 1024x768 screens.
As part of the switch, I moved from using a table-based layout to a CSS-based layout. I even wrote custom dasBlog macros that render my naviagation menu and date archive as unordered lists. The default dasBlog macros for those are rendered using tables. (Note, I didn't rewrite the category list, so I'm not completely table free). If there's interest from the dasBlog community, I'll post the code.
I gotta say, I'm not sure I see what the big deal about CSS over tables is. I mean, I'm as impressed as the next guy with CSS Zen Garden, but honestly I don't get it. Maybe it's because I'm a developer, not a designer at heart. But CSS seems like hard-coded voodoo to me. This site has a simple fixed-width two-column layout, but it took a great deal of experimentation to get the floats coded correctly to render in both IE and FireFox. In fact, there's a small issue with the new deisgn in IE that I didn't bother to fix. But if I had just used tables, it would have taken five minutes.
Please let me know what you think of the new design.