I’m spending the morning revising Rob’s Totally Awesome Guitar Teaching Handbook, still on track for an October 3 release. Writing a first draft can be a slog, but I love revising. I just turned a terrible paragraph in the book—my introduction to my Teaching 101 chapter—into one of favorites:

Old:
Teaching is a complex art, and it takes a lot of practice to be really good at it, but you’ll be off to a great start if you use the roadmap that I’m about to lay out for you.

New:
Aristotle calls teaching “the highest form of understanding.” What does that make the act of teaching about teaching? I don’t know, but it sounds like it could create a black hole.

To avoid obliterating the universe, I won’t try to teach you everything…

Much better.

Update: The Handbook is now available for purchase here.

I hope you find the new site easier to navigate and easier on the eyes. Let me know what you think, especially if you find any bugs. Thanks!

After a few readers said they didn’t like the white-text-on-brown-background in the last design proposal, I did some research about text readability. I was surprised to discover that there isn’t consensus, except that high contrast is good. I did find one almost decade-old study claiming that green-on-pale-yellow was most readable, but I’ll save that color scheme for my next gardening blog, thank you very much.

Here’s a more conservative design. In addition to changing font and background color, I’ve increased the body text size and navigation a bit–two changes I think I’ll keep no matter what I do.

I like the look of the original design more, but I do think this is more readable.

What do you think?

I’m redesigning my site in preparation for launching my eBook next month. What do you think so far?

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