Yes, it’s that time of year again. I redesign my website out of sheer boredom. That, and the desire to test a few tricks I learned while redesigning the Science News site.

The goal was a clean, text-driven look based on legible, flexible CSS and a bare minimum of PHP in the background. All of the templates I started completely from scratch, or after taking a hatchet to snippets of the WordPress default template. I added just enough styles to make it readable, one or two images (including a favorite over-exposed photo I had used in an earlier design), and stopped right there.

I included none of the graphical doodads I had been planning in an earlier redesign attempt–minimalism looked better.

Also, I was lazy.

Along the way I found some awesome WordPress plugins and tricks:

• Smart Archives, a very simple and intuitive approach to displaying WP archives, which I’ve hacked for my purposes.
• FlickrRSS and Exec-PHP, which I used for this page.
• MySQL find-and-replace, which was essential for repairing a few broken image links once I moved my WP installation from a subdirectory /blog to the root of my webserver.

That’s it. Say goodbye to the old look (and the never-quite-appropriate-or-sensical name ‘Orange Orange’) forever: