New Website
I decided the time had come to change the design of my site, mostly because I wanted to brush up on my design skills a little.
So, this is what I came up with. I’m moderately pleased with it; could be a little nicer, but practice makes perfect. I thought that while I was at it, I should have a go at basing the site on a blogging platform and do away with the mostly-static PHP approach that I had before.
I went with the slogan “discovering beauty in code” because I think that there really is a sort of elegance about good code that could be considered beautiful. I might change the monitor a bit, not completely happy with it atm.
I chose Wordpress as the platform and so far I have been very impressed. There have been a couple of disadvantages moving to this type of system; I can no longer boast a Strict doctype and it’s a little less portable (being database driven), but I wanted to have comments and RSS so I thought rather than build my own, I would go with something a little more established.
Themeing was a breeze. I started by cutting up my design and implementing it in straight XHTML / CSS. Then I made a copy of the default template and imported my changes. Then I went through the various pages and tweaked the CSS so that most things looked correct and voila! There are still a couple of bugs that need to be worked out, but I’m getting to them slowly.
Then I imported my old posts. The portfolio is a little out of date and I’ll try to get that fixed up soon. I’ll also have to import all the images that I used to have associated with the various posts but that will require a little more CSS and I feel I have done enough for 1 weekend. The administration section of Wordpress is very good; quite usable and very attractive. Little bits of DHTML and AJAX are implemented in a way that complements the user experience rather than claiming it.
I recommend everyone give Wordpress a bit of a go, it really is quite easy to install, theme and get up and running!