Things definitely to come in the redesign:

1. Less junk on the page. Somehow.
2. Less crufty CSS.
3. More elegant typography.
4. More elegant design, period.
5. New site logo and masthead.
6. New navigational resources, including a greatest hits.

Things I’m thinking about:

1. Dumping the news item department graphics, in favor of text links. On the plus side, they brighten up the page a bit; on the minus side, they’re not exactly coherent, design wise, and they’re probably a good deal less understandable (unless you’re in the habit of mousing over graphics) than a simple link to the department archives page would be.
2. The blogroll. Well, not dumping it, exactly, but maybe getting smarter about how I show it, along the lines of Greg’s MORE link. It will definitely disappear from sublevel pages.
3. The badges, unless required by some sort of reciprocal agreement.

Here are some of the extremely helpful resources I’ve been consulting:

• Zeldman’s CSS smorgasbord II, an enormously useful rollup of links about designing with CSS; which has in turn led me to…
• Layout-o-matic, and its kindred spirit tool List-o-matic.
• And, of course, the CSS reference, handily available (if you aren’t on a wireless LAN) in PDF form.

My website repair efforts continue to limp along. I am manually rendering the past few days in October, and will be looking at any pages that I manually designated as having a static path (mostly via my Site Map).

In the meantime, I’m full speed ahead on the redesign. Notes to come.