It’s late, I’m tired and there are certainly a few details left to iron out but I’m happy to announce a fresh upgrade of my website for 2006. I hope that you’ll find the new site easier than ever to navigate and that it’s compelling enough to make you return from time to time. With the bulk of the site design finalized I will return to doing what I like best: writing articles and doing podcasts (I might even toss in a videocast or two). For you long-time readers or computer nerds interested in what’s different with the site keep reading!
I have switched hosting services from Earthlink to MediaTemple and switched content management systems from MovableType to WordPress. It hasn’t been easy or fast and it all began with a private message from Brad (aka Starfleet X), the Administrator of a computer geek messageboard that I like to visit. Brad showed me a pretty serious flaw with the way that my site was handling URLs and almost immediately I began considering an entire site revamp less than a year after rolling out the one I had.
On the way back to Atlanta from a business seminar in San Francisco I bought two web design books: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.
Krug’s book is an eye-opening, head-smacking vision of clarity for how to approach web design. By the time that I finished the book, somewhere over the Mississippi, I knew that the site I was running was a terrible maze of bad design.
Dan Cederholm’s book is the first printed reference that I’ve found useful for using cascading stylesheets, far outstripping my previous reference, “Eric Meyer on CSS”, and his website has been a useful “living laboratory” for me to reverse-engineer. Mea Culpa: the technique behind the navigation menu that I’m using in this first batch of styles has been lifted directly from Dan’s website, SimpleBits.com.
I look forward to adding new stylesheets from time to time.
