carvingCode: carving unique nooks in the web™

I’m working on a new project.  It’s essentially a redesign of a weblog which I am porting into ExpressionEngine and making use of its features to extend what the weblog does.  This is a weblog which displays pictures of greeting cards that are individually designed.  There’s a description of the techniques used, primarily associated with the use of rubber stamps, color schemes, cards stocks, etc.

The weblog has been in WordPress, but had outgrown its feature set unless the owner installed some custom plugins.  Under ExpressionEngine, the new features will be easy to implement.

I’m looking forward to working on this.  Color scheme, basic template design, etc. is complete.  Next comes implementing the real content management.  I’ve tested the import of posts from WordPress and it works, although there’s no suitable option that also auto-creates the categories.  (Frankly, I think EllisLab should provide this import functionality instead of designers needing to rely on outdated and unsupported 3rd-party hacks.)

More on this project as it moves forward.

I just replaced the theme I had re-launched this site with just over a week ago.  That’s the problem with web development—it’s so easy to make changes that I find myself tweeking the site instead of doing other things.

While the previous site was fine, it wasn’t my own.  I bought a theme and re-worked it.  Nothing wrong with this; I often recommend reworking themes, but in this case—for my own site—I decided, after the fact (and over 20 hours of work), that it wasn’t the way I wanted to go.

Process

I started with the grid of the homepage and placed borders around everything so I could see the margins and padding.  The previous theme was a little too tight, so I designed in more white space and created a two-column design instead of three.  This give more room for the content and allowed me to increase the font-size a bit.

I then worked on the header region, creating a shorter space for the logo and site navigation.  I’ve enjoyed designs I’ve recently come across that minimizes space requirements for header stuff, allowing users to get to the real purpose of the web site quicker.

Main site navigation went through a few versions before deciding, again, on a minimalistic approach.  Many sites are using a tab-based navbar, so I decided to steer the other direction and keep it simple.  I then followed up by placing the site navigation in the footer region also.

The color scheme stems from the basic and white with the black moved a little toward gray.  For a third color, I originally used a shade of purple, but in the end opted for a brilliant blue.  As I’m using that is only a few places, it counters the starkness of black and white well.

Still to do

I’ll be adding a portfolio section soon, but I need to rethink how I want to present that.  I also may be combining the “articles” and “blog” sections as I’m not sold on having those independent.  Expanding categories and using them to selectively display content seems to be the way I’m leaning.  I’m also going to do something with the image region on the homepage, possible a little rollover effect which displays a color version of the image.

I received an invite through my LinkedIn account this AM from a past student.  He’s really become a success and it was good to hear from him, and good to hear that I had some impact on his life.  A welcome for any teacher.

It has been a long time since I last talked to you when I worked for you as a teaching assistant at Clinton-Massie in 2000. I would like to thank you as I have used many of the basic skills I picked up in your classes.