I’m currently working on an upgrade of one of the web sites I manage.  The current site is a collection of static pages with PHP includes, while the new site will be powered by the latest version of Wordpress.

I’ve enjoyed using Wordpress as a content management system.  The new templating system is relatively easy to use, and gibes well with what I’ve learned from my professional experience with web sites.  I think it’s a great lesson in CMS development as well - determining what’s dynamic vs. static, what’s styled in CSS or structured in HTML code, and what the various colors and fonts need to be to make the site readable.

Advantages of using Wordpress vs. static updates include:

• Word-like text editor to enter and edit content, without the need to know HTML.
• Automatic ability to push new pages to multiple news feeds.  Write a post or page, tag it with keywords, click “submit,” and it automatically goes out over Google News.
• Fancier functionality.  No more manually updating the right column; I click “post” and all the links update.
• Individual pages.  Let’s say you Google “Pray for Priests magnets” - you get http://www.serraboston.org/news.php, but you have to scroll halfway down the page to get to the relevant content.  With the new site, each page of content should appear as its own web site, with links to similar articles.
• Fancier functionality than my current blog, which also needs an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

I’d post a preview, but I hope to have the fully dynamic site online in a few days.

Jon Tangerine offers a clean and incredibly well designed site and blog.

What I like:

• His About page is near perfect - enough information to give you a sense of who he is, with compact clusters of information bunched around the page.
• The Blog - it’s centered and simple, with little “asides” on the left and right.
• The dates and tags appear as small links on the top.  I’ve been wondering about this for my blog - as of this writing the categories take up a huge column on the right side of the page.  I much prefer his centered column which puts the content front and center.
• The search is awesome - I like the subtle effect that happens when you click on the text box and it turns black.
• Great use of fonts. The explanation of his logo serves as a great example of what CSS can do, and what he can do with it.

I’m not 100% sold on:

• The title appears on the left of each post, so you can’t scan the headings vertically.  I must admit it’s easy to scan the page and see what each post is about, and it’s an interesting break from almost every other blog design on the internet.
• The white space gets a bit overwhelming (I still like gray backgrounds to focus the eye) but the centered blog design works well with the “calligraphy” theme he has going on.
• The footer at the bottom of each page is a bit wonky, but since he seems to be involved in so many web 2.0 groups it’s probably inevitable.

What the - Okay Samurai just switched to a gray background.

Odd, because it better matches Chris Glass’ blog as well as an upcoming redesign for this blog.  I chose a gray background because I think it makes the content pop better - your eye gets drawn to the images and colors in the content, not the background of the blog.  I also like gray better than total white, which does use whitespace but makes the content get lost in a sea of white (like Wordpress, in my opinion).

An interesting trend in web 2.0 design, I guess.

The brilliant Chris Glass has a simple comparison chart of cars he’s looking to buy.  I love the fact that it has no “key” to explain it, but the eye is quickly drawn to the pros/cons and can obtain enough detail to make a choice.

One ridiculously minor issue - the indented bullets give the columns an off-kilter feeling, instead of being left-aligned.  This chart was clearly created for his own benefit but the left-aligned columns could be easily fixed if one were to present it to someone else.

About 2 weeks ago I woke in the middle of the night with a mission statement and a general idea for my web site still burning in my head.  Today, that mission statement went on the front page of jobriga.com.

This is a much-needed improvement to the site, removing the broken images, broken portfolio links, and outdated items on the old site (see screenshot below).  Having a simple site is better than having a broken one.

The idea for the old page was to link to multiple projects in my “portfolio,” and to list major web projects on the right.  I am proud of the first two items here (The Jardin de la Nina Maria and Kerryandwillie.com) but www.joesanswers.com is never updated, www.joannanddan.com is now defunct.  The MPRP Apostolate is worth a look but should be higher on the page.

Also, there are a bunch of basic mistakes with the old page:

1. Gigantic broken images in the center of the page
2. E-mail with @ sign listed on the front page - hellooooo  spammers!
3. Portfolio items on right take a long time to produce and add
4. Loads of broken links - the idea was to link to items in a dynamic Drupal site, but Drupal appears to be WAY too high maintenance (at least for me).
5. Lots of images; not as optimized for search engines as it could be.
6. “Bad” code - lots of tables, some CSS, not great structure.  I’d like to put my newfound coding abilities to the test and create a site that’s visually appealing but still shows off some coding ability.

My new approach: put up a simple site, and keep adding features/graphics/ideas over time.

Today is day 1 of the new design; I’m looking forward to implementing the rest of my ideas!