People who know me well would definitely say that I thrive on change. I rearrange furniture monthly, have reformatted my computer more times than I like to admit, and have gone through more website changes than I can count. This latest iteration of my website has been a long time coming and was fueled by many usability concerns for both customers, browsers, and myself. Being the busy über-nerd that I am, I debated back and forth between out-sourcing the design to free up my time versus getting up to my elbows in code, and ultimately the do-it-yourself side of me won out.
For the geeky and/or curious, what you are looking at now (until I redesign my site again) is a WordPress powered theme I cooked up from scratch using HTML5 and CSS3 standards, with very few images (2 to be precise). I tried to simplify the code to the bare essential semantic markup and use as few template files as possible. The theme took me longer to design because I approached it more like building a framework so that the next time I get the masochistic impulse to redesign my website I have a perfect starting point. The hardest part for all of this was actually the shopping cart plugin I built for my portfolio items. I had sampled a ton of options for selling things through paypal, but never could get something that would auto-generate options for every item that I would like to sell, and so rather than spend 10 minutes every time I wanted to add a new portfolio item, I poured over paypal forums and help files to create my own wordpress plugin.
This brings me to my next point – I regrettably started this design from scratch with a fresh install of WordPress 3.0 and have been slowly reintroducing content. Some things have slipped through the cracks and all of my old subscribers have had their RSS feeds slammed with a flurry of “new” posts. The end is in sight though, as most of my old portfolio is back online and I will soon be posting my new images that I held off posting during this whole redesign.
Thank you all for bearing with me, and please don’t hesitate to offer any suggestions you have for my website in the comments below, or with my contact form.