Why the New Design?
Part of me really enjoyed what I had to work with in the previous iteration; part of me wants to continue using it and it was a bit of a struggle to get this version going; now I’m stuck, whether this is good or not, because a good portion of the files for the old version are gone. That leaves me with this fully integrated WordPress theme. Not that this is a bad thing.
Prior to the version you’re reading from now, the site was an integration between WordPress and my own static site; I built parts of it beyond WordPress, portions as a theme, and the rest was some amalgamation of both. In this version my goal was to build the site using WordPress as a CMS and create custom templates for pages that I needed. So far, so good.
And this didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. Once I finally settled on the layout, design, and coded a raw version, I could convert it to a theme that can be used with WordPress. The initial process took me about two weeks, as I had roughly two pages to get together, and some other work to do, while turning it into a theme took four hours.
Four hours.
I’m blown away by that. I’ve just about got theme customization down to a science, which is why I think I will be offering blog design and development as a service in the very near future.
And I can’t speak of the greatness of WordPress nearly enough. It is a fantastic platform for building simple dynamic web sites.
Anyway, my thinking here with the new design is to focus a little more on writing. I do it from time to time here and in other places, but I was often turning to quotes and links in an effort to fill up this site and that gets a little boring for me and anyone who happens to be swinging by the site.
At this point, I have a little work to do on the portfolio, but the site is good to go for now.