Website makeover
Posted on March 14, 2008 in Web Design and Textpattern. - Comments [2]
With the rain pouring down outside and a few moments to myself I thought it might be nice to give the website a make over after all I’ve never been that satisfied with the old look as it was the product of necessity and limited time. This time however it would be nice to sort out some of the problems.
So what were the objectives of this re-design? The first objective was to simplify the layout and reduce the overall screen clutter and reorganise some of the sections.
Organisation
The first thing I needed to do was to think about how I was organising my articles and how that was being represented by my sections and categories. It was obvious to me that it would make sense to combine my Commodore 64 and Amiga sections into one section with a slightly broader scope. As a result, the Retro-Computing section was born. At least this way the little Amiga content I had wouldn’t feel so lost.
The drawback reorganising content like this is that URLs are going to change. If this was a commercial site I’d be a little more worried but with the small number of articles and visitor it doesn’t really matter. What I will do it make sure that my “404 Page not found” error response still makes sense and works as expected.
Layout
The first thing I did was remove one of the columns. I found that trying to work out which was the right column to place content and navigation was confusing me. I dread to think what it was like for my visitors. Why had I chosen to have two sub columns in the first place? I didn’t have a purpose as such, I just liked the way it looked on someone else’s site.
I really wanted to try and clean things up. With the old site I’d added features just because I could. Not really the best way to go about it. This time lets try to keep it simple and make sure that everything displayed on a page is at least done in context.
Each page is comprised of the following structural elements:
- Header
- Content
- Sidebar
- Sub footer
- Footer
The layout has been designed with scope for some future improvements I plan to make (when I get the time!)
Textpattern
For anyone that’s interested this site is built using the rather wonderful Textpattern, a free open-source CMS tool that I bumped into when I was looking for something to drive my works company intranet. The flexible plug-in architecture made it nice and easy to integrate some of our existing tools. There’s also a mass of great plugins that add a whole feast of nice features.
The latest version 4.0.6 was released at the beginning of the year so I’ve painlessly upgraded that too.
If you’re about to embark on a web project and you’ve got some understanding of XHTML & CSS then I recommend that you give Textpattern a look. It may not give you exactly what you want, but it doesn’t try to force you to do things in a particular manner and it provides a simple framework that you can develop as your project requires.
The result
Well you’re looking at it! I’d like to know what you think. As with most of my projects there are some things that I’m still not completely happy with but maybe it’s better to get things up and online than keep fiddling with the details for the rest of the year. Especially as there’s content that needs creating.
Comments
Wim, TXP is incredibly flexible. I’ve mainly used it on a multi-author company intranet site with many many sections and it does the job there fantastically.
It’s always nice to be able to either embed some raw PHP to get something done, or put a plug-in together.
Although that might be exactly the thing that puts you off using it for a blog.
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Nice site! I’m considering TXP also as CMS for my blog that’s currently WP-based.