A facelift I can probably stay with
I’ve always been a little schizophrenic about the designs I slap on my web sites. I really like mucking around with XHTML and CSS, but don’t have time to play with it in my spare time anymore and my work now focuses almost entirely on project management, interaction design and information architecture. So my own sites are really my only opportunity to have a little markup fun. I think I can live with this one for a while, though.
I wanted to make sure I took a slightly different approach this time. While it’s still a blog at it’s core, I wanted to make the static pages stand alone more, to hopefully accommodate a little more professional and academically related content as I move forward. Maybe papers, presentations and other pieces of progress as I go wherever the MA I’m working on, takes me – but a journal on steroids.
My basic strategy was to make the landing page a digital aggregator of most of my online life, while I can easily add and separate more static content and focus the pages a little more. I like trying to bend the WordPress structure a little with a few conditional statements and typography, for the most part. The sparse layout is no accident, focusing on words and the odd image, while allowing it all to breathe. A slight newspaper look was my overall inspiration.
A word or two on WordPress
WordPress makes it very easy to play around with markup and style to your heart’s content. With the various domains, blogs and personal sites I’ve had over the past few years, I’ve experimented with lots of things, including the root for the wanless.info domain, which is there largely for posterity. However, that’s not WordPress, just a hand-coded site that I put together entirely with PHP and flat text files. I gotta remember to retire that at some point.
I’ve built my share of WordPress sites, like the one you’re on, this, or this. At other times I’ve done more interaction and IA while someone else coded, like this and this. Unfortunately, at BCIT we’re doing mostly Drupal for standalone projects like our student blogs, Five Forward, or What Would You Change – let’s just say I’m no big fan.
I’d love to be able to do some more WordPress work at BCIT, but I think I’ll just have to live without it.
