Every now and then I get this sudden impulse to do the nitty-gritty of web design and development.
With my design cap on, I open up Photoshop, Dreamweaver, FireFox, Safari, IE, and iTunes, hunker down and start plugging away at mockups, screenshots, a little tinkering with PHP, CSS, and in this case Javascript and XML.
Fortunately the weather cooperated this Labour Day weekend. Overcast clouds and rain are usually the nemesis, but they quickly became my greatest ally in whipping together some new work – the product this weekend: my redesigned site!
Some Specs
WordPress as a Platform - I’ve stuck with using WordPress as the primary platform to power my site. With a strong community of developers creating new plug-ins and themes, along with the ease with which templates can be tweaked and extended, not to mention the slick admin tools, the elegance, power, and supporting community offered by WordPress can’t be beat.
Customized Theme – Using a great design/template framework from Nick La as my starting point, I’ve created new icons and applied my own look and feel.
Plugged In – Carrying on from the last iteration of my blog, I’ve kept a couple plug-ins: FAlbum to pull in photos from my Flickr account, and the legendary Akismet to fight the spam. I’ve also just added cforms to power my contact form and possibly other forms down the road.
Javascript & AJAX Add-Ons – Although you can’t see it yet, I’ve also built in an underlying framework to add some visual effects and AJAX functionality. Hopefully these will be released in the near future.
On the Horizon
There are a few areas of my site that I’ll be tackling next:
Resources & Links – I used to have a big collection of links and various resources that I managed using my own personally developed bookmarking application. Its primary purpose was to give me a way to store and easily access my bookmarks remotely (kinda like del.icio.us, only, in my picky mind, easier to use and prettier to look at). As a side effect, it also brought in some random traffic to my site. In any case, I’ll be working on getting this back up and running, and there’s a very good chance I’ll use the built-in Blogroll tools in WordPress to help this along.
Portfolio – One of the items on my “to-do” list has been to put together my professional portfolio. I have a vision of how I’d like to integrate this into my site – first step was to re-skin my site with my own design – so next step will be some tinkering with my WordPress installation, a little tinkering with different “assets” in my site (Hint: see note above about Javascript & AJAX Add-Ons), and hopefully I’ll be good to go in the near future.
