The Dirt Under the Rugs

Friday, August 29, 2008

A few aes­thetic changes came to my web­site tonight. This is me work­ing toward a larger issue, which is that my web­site has not be work­ing for me. I real­ized this a while ago, and have been mulling over it a bit, but haven’t had time to do any­thing about it. Busy, busy. Yada, yada, yada. For now, parts of my web­site are removed, namely my port­fo­lio (or what there was of it). Also removed are the pages for ‘about me’ and ‘con­tact me’. Their con­tents have been revised and put in the left column, always vis­i­ble, which will remain into the future. A few other aes­thetic changes.

In a few weeks, after a few more impor­tant projects are fin­ished, this site will see an over­haul in every regard. Most impor­tantly it will be redesigned to really work at sell­ing my ser­vices. It’s kind of an impor­tant fea­ture when run­ning a business.

Meanwhile, I’ve also started a more tech­ni­cal list of goals to push my skills for­ward a bit:

  • Move site to Textpat­tern (WordPress has grown up a lot recently, but I’m ready to move on, try some­thing different)
  • Sen­si­ble order of con­tent in markup (I’m mainly focus­ing on the chance visit via screen reader, which I haven’t given much thought to previously)
  • Pos­si­bly make some clever use of jQuery (Not just for the sake of using it, but if nec­es­sary, and I’d like to learn a bit more about it)
  • Build with­out browser hacks or Dean Edwards’ IE7 script
  • Write markup and CSS as com­pactly as possible
  • Move to XHTML 1.0 Strict Doc­type (I’ve been writ­ing in Tran­si­tional mode ever since I read Zeldman’s now-​green book 4 years ago, time to grow up)

That’s it for now. I’m going to focus on writ­ing more about design. I’m find­ing it a good exer­cise in think­ing about what I’m doing and how I can do it better. And within that I’m also con­sid­er­ing open­ing up the site for com­ments. I haven’t found them nec­es­sary in the past year, but it’ll be good to have some open dia­logue about design ideas. If you can dig it, or have any com­ments about that list I made, please drop me an email (ricky at this domain) and let me know.