Feedback on the new look so far has been fairly mixed (remember this is only a rough draft!). Overall opinion seems to be that if the site looks good as it is why bother changing it. Good question. There are lots of reasons why but I'll try and explain my main objective.

Remember when you started coding and you hacked together any bits of code you could in order to solve a problem, just as long as it worked! I do. Then you get introduced to the concepts of best-practices when writing efficient and re-usable code. You start worrying that if your peers see your code they will laugh behind your back. As a "professional" you really want to improve your code and appear to know your stuff. After a few years you even start to appreciate why you're doing it...

Languages like Java have whole books dedicated to these best practices. So why doesn't web development? Think of your web page. Unlike most other programs you share with the world its source code is easily viewed by absolutely anybody. Why then do we use such deplorable acts as using tables for page-layout, leaving tags unclosed, not giving images any size attributes, etc, all allowing our peers to scoff at our work?

I want to be proud of my work and that includes the way I design the bits of sites that only my peers will bother to look at. That in itself is the main reason I am about to start a major overhaul of codestore. You can try and convince me otherwise if you like but you will have a job...