Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

Nearly two years ago, Born Geek opened its doors for the first time. Roughly six months later, Year of the Code Monkey did the same. The plan in those good ol’ days was simple: Born Geek was to be my primary web presence, while this blog was to be a fun side project. Somewhere along the way, the roles got reversed. This website has received way more loving than its older sister, and it’s starting to show. Time for a change? You bet.

I am in the process of moving Born Geek to the Movable Type platform, and I hope to complete the shift in the next two weeks. There are a total of 106 pages to be migrated (103 of which are static HTML), though not every one of those pages is coming along for the ride; all of the news archives will be tossed and I may also remove the Firefox 1.0 toolbar tutorial. In this vein, an overall site simplification scheme is planned. Step one will be to migrate to the new platform and go live. Step two will focus on simplifying each page, condensing the copy on each considerably. Once I’m finished, the site should both look and feel better.

Dan Cederholm has rebranded SimpleBits, and the results are very nice. If I had 1% of this man’s creative genius, I would be quite pleased with myself.

For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of web design is the actual design step. Coding a given design? Easy. Making that design standards compliant? No problem. Actually coming up with the design concept itself? Mind-numbingly difficult. I occasionally check the Color Schemer Galleries for decent schemes, and there are a number of nice ones there, but determining how to use each color is a task I struggle to succeed at.

Does anyone have any strategies they use? Any pointers to decent resources? I already know about the Color Harmonies site and the Visibone Webmaster’s Color Lab. Can anyone do this, or must one be an ‘artist’ to excel?

Last year at this time, I was thinking about various content management systems for user over at Born Geek (sister site to this blog). I never made a decision, mostly because so many of the available options seemed weak to me. One year later, very little has changed and I’m still looking to migrate the site from the hand-built system I use today to a database driven solution.

Currently, I’m leaning towards using WordPress, the same package I use here at this blog. I like the interface that it offers, its documentation is top notch, and I’m already quite familiar with it. The only real downside I can see with the package is that pages are built on the fly. Every month, Born Geek averages 1.56 GB of data transferred, 542,818 hits, and 17,955 unique users. With this much activity on the site, I’m a little concerned about database accesses and the subsequent processor time needed to generate each page. A caching plug-in is available for WordPress, and I hear decent things about it. But will it be enough?

I’m seriously thinking about giving it a try later this winter (converting the site will take some time). So keep your eyes peeled. In the mean time, if you have suggestions for CMS-like systems that might fit the bill, let me know. I’m certainly open to suggestions.

For several weeks now, I’ve been cooking up two projects for this blog: a new WordPress theme and a new photo album software package. Since it’s been a little while since I last mentioned them, I figure it’s time for a small update on what’s going on.

The WordPress theme I’ve been working on is complete, and ready to be rolled out. In fact, lucky visitors to the site may have already seen the theme in action, as I’ve been doing some live testing in preparation for the unveiling. The only thing holding me up on actually deploying this theme is my new photo album software (I want to avoid having to hack the Plogger stuff again to make it look decent in the new theme).

My new photo album package is coming along nicely. I’ve gotten the photo importing process working, although the large thumbnail creation step is still broken. The front end for viewing albums is nearly completed, and I hope to insert it into my new theme sometime this week. A number of things still need to be finished before I can actually migrate away from Plogger. Much of the administration interface is still inactive, and that represents a considerable amount of work. An interface to edit and remove existing albums needs to be implemented, the user options need to be improved, and other miscellaneous changes and fixes need to be made. I have recently made excellent progress on this project, but there’s still a long ways to go. My goal is to have this new software in a workable state before the end of this month. So far, I’m on schedule to meet that target. Stay tuned for further news. I’m very excited about all this new stuff.

I know it has been live for a few days now, but the new design over at Slashdot is a most welcome change. The site had become quite crufty, looking more like a website from the mid-1990’s than a hip, modern site of today. This new CSS redesign has made the site much cleaner, and I have to believe that they are now enjoying significant bandwidth savings since they’ve gone the CSS route (though their markup still isn’t the prettiest in the world). Hopefully this face lift will boost the site’s apparently sagging popularity. I for one, am most pleased with what they’ve done.

Born Geek now has a new look. Like it? Love it? Hate it? Comments are welcome. Lots of other stuff is going on over at our sister site, so head over and check it all out. Good times.