New Website Design

First thanks to Tom who redesigned this site, and wrestled with all the nasty blogger.com code to make the look far more user friendly. We're about 90% of the way through the changes but most that will be apparent to the reader are in place. Below are some of the major changes to the site

1. Eye friendly color scheme, moving away from grandma's 1960s kitchen wallpaper coloring
2. Horizontal menu added across top of page - funneling the most important areas of the blog in one easy to read location. About Me, Investing Philosophy, Performance/Portfolio, Fund FAQ/Pledges, Economic Forecast/Track Record - now all found in the menu. By moving these items from the "right margin" to their own page entries, a lot more detail/explanation could be added
   
3. Instead of a left margin and right margin with content in the middle - now the content is the first thing to load and all "extra" stuff is on the right side in 2 columns.
4. Center column has been made wider so longer posts do not require as much scrolling. In the future we are going to be adding a "read more" function" to save more space (on each entry other than the one on the top of the page), but coding this is proving tricky. At that point we will move the # of entries on the front page from 4 to 6. I generally write 6 to 8 entries a day - and since not every reader is interested in every post - this will make navigation of the front page much easier
5. Reduced the number of information sections (i.e. blogrolls, top posts of the week, recent comments) in the margins by about half - much of this data has now been moved into the menu options.
6. Subscription options (RSS/email) and my email address now easier to find and take up much less space
7. Moved Search and archives to more prominent location

I'm sure I forgot a lot of the minutiae but these are the most obvious changes. The overall goal was to make this website, chock full of information, and 3200+ posts - easier to navigate for both experienced and new user.