I have found some good ideas that I always found were hard to incorporate into the Drupal site. I really wanted to learn the MVC for a variety of reasons and one of them was to get back more control. I am getting it.
I am not sure I am so good at the DRY principle, but I am getting what I like and lots of control. I am also getting more comfortable with reading code, making mistakes (and finding them) and getting the design to work the way I like.
I just looked at some cool sites, and then added my front page non-scrolling bar on the left. I love this design. For now. I also added the svg images. I found a way to draw and color them nicely with illustrator, so I can now make some reasonably good images for free! (maybe not professional, but illustrator really can enhance things a lot… it helps!)
My background is pretty plain now. I might just add some more images along the way, or a background. Not quite sure which yet. Stay with white until I go mad. Simple is good.