In the past month I’ve made some major upgrades to the Serra Boston web site, including:

• Custom CSS for multiple page types – monthly archives, tag archives, pages, and so on.
• A search box that appears in the upper right of every page, not to mention customized search results using Wordpress’ search engines. An interesting exercise in information architecture (to think about what users want to see in search results), PHP coding, and CSS.
• Search Engine Optimization through Google sitemaps and Feedburner. When I write new content on the site, the site actively pushes the content out to various news feeds on the Internet.
• Web traffic analysis through Google Analytics.
• I’m still getting the hang of the Wordpress engine that powers the site, but so far it’s suitable for my content management needs.
• An About the Site page to track meta-information about the site, such as upgrades or the site’s purpose in fulfilling the mission of Serra Boston. I took the idea from the MoMA site, which collects all the site’s information (awards, credits, etc) in a single link at the bottom.
• Setting up a development environment (as a sandbox to play around in) and a staging environment (to preview the site before it’s pushed live), so that edits have minimal impact on the live site.
• To be released soon: category and archive listings in the right sidebar. The picture of Blessed Junipero Serra was put there to fill in the white space, but could be replaced by more useful content.

The site is shaping up nicely, but is due for an overhaul. I’ve been patching on different elements as necessary (for example, the CSS used to control the search box) but there have been enough updates to warrant