Another Redesign and Blogging App Reviews
First of all, I wanted to apologize to anyone who may have been on Adrian3.com yesterday (March 9, 2008). I have been playing with a new redesign and that always causes things to be broken and fixed here and there. I find it easier to just do a redesign and all the troubleshooting that goes with it on the live site. It may break things for a little while, but it saves time and gets my new design up before I tire of it. I still have some bugs and additions that I will implement in the coming days, but it is 90% there.
This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design.
This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design. For this one I wanted to let things breathe. Web typography is always a challenge and I feel pretty good about how the type looks on the page. The other thing to notice about the redesign that you will notice is that I added links to the social networks I use. If you are on one of those sites add me as a contact.
A couple notes about content management:
I was seriously looking at alternatives to WordPress for this site’s content management but ultimately decided against it. In my book, WordPress is firmly in the lead in the battle for best blogging platform. Movable Type slipped into second with there latest version (although I still use it for all my other sites) and it is just slow and clunky. It would be nice to learn Drupal for use on more corporate sites and I may take another look at it in the future, but for now I can’t afford the rumored “learning curve” that comes with it. Textpattern looks good, too, and I will test that one eventually. I also looked at Radiant and Mephisto because they run on Ruby on Rails. I have been teaching myself the basics of Rails and it seemed like a blog would be a good place to start improving my skills. While I was right about it being a good way to learn, it wasn’t the best way for me to run a blog. I liked the simplicity of Radiant’s interface. Mephisto is maybe a little better for blogs. Unfortunately, it took too much work to setup a server with Rails and all the hassle of installing them was too much. Once you finally get them installed they are still a little underdeveloped and lacking the database of user contributed development. WordPress and MT have been hacked and tweaked by their community of users so much that you can pretty much do anything you want with them. Maybe Radiant or Mephisto will get to that same point, but in the meantime you need to be a Rails whiz to customize it. For use on corporate sites I don’t see the initial setup time being worth the hassle. You can have WordPress running in under half an hour without any heavy lifting. I don’t usually have the luxury of a development team so the simpler the better.
