New website. AGAIN. Why?

A groundhog

A groundhog

A few months ago I updated my website. Now I’m considering doing it again. Say what?

The last update was an emergency thing (sort of. No-one’s house was burning down or anything). I wanted to add a contact form and other bits and pieces to the site, and the theme I had used originally was dragged down by ancient PHP-coding which flat-out refused to allow me to add a simple little plugin. So readers couldn’t subscribe to my newsletter or download my little guide to working with designers. Pah.

A quick update to the theme, retaining a lot of my original design, and after a weekend of bleary-eyed coding I came up with this site.

Which is okay. But not perfect.

The whole point about good design is that it engages people. It takes dry text and brings it to life. It shows rather than tells. It needs to show the world who you are.

So it’s vital to regularly review how you present yourself to the world. And although I’m not in love with this site, I couldn’t work out in which direction I wanted to travel. Until I saw this documentary on Parkour, and it all became clear. And now I hold an image in my head – a concept, rather – and I know how to move forward.

I knew this site was too wordy. I know that at present, I tell rather than show. Which is a bit silly, for a designer. But I know that a lot of people find design a bit scary, and get put off by the uber-minimalist image-led focus of many designers’ sites. So I wanted to talk to people and tell them about me, about what I do, and about the way I work. But I think I’ve got the balance wrong.

This site doesn’t suit me any more. I’ve grown leaner, fitter, stronger – and it hangs heavy around me.

My new site will be agile. Curious. Engaging. It will present my vision to the world (oh, it sounds hella precocious, I know, but I promise it won’t be so bad!). At the moment I’m all, “this is my business, you should hire me”. I want to be, “this is the energy and attitude I bring to the world – you want some?”

But, as doctors make the worst patients, graphic designers are their own worst clients. It’ll take time. I am blessed with a very busy period at the moment, but hope to have the new site launched for my birthday at the end of May.

Ah – the possibilities! One could drown in them.

Yma, Ysgyfarnog, Yma

CSS nearly there – just a few tweaks to make. And I roughed up a quick hare header until I have time to get the one in my head out onto paper and then into my mac. Hooray! Proof that I can work my web-designy magic in just a few hours, including fixing some java script about which I have no knowledge whatsoever… Still need to be fixing some PHP but that’ll come.

(And the title of this blog, in case you were wondering, translates to “Here, hare, here”, obviously…)

Yuck!

Okay, so I’ll be straight with you. WordPress has had a couple of updates of its software in fairly quick succession and the theme I use (the original layout which I’ve embroidered and shined and generally made mine) is a little ancient and creaking at the seams. There are a few things I can’t do, including adding a contact form. So I’m going to do an emergency re-design over the next few days. The theme I’m upgrading to isn’t pretty but I like the structure of it, so will need to amend the CSS to my liking. This means that if you’re checking this site between Friday 14th January and Monday 17th January it might look a bit bloody horrible. This is to save time  – I’ll be tweaking the CSS on the hoof while the site is live. I have some fab NEW stuff I want to add to my site and so this has got to happen right now, I’m afraid…

Well hello there!

Wooooo! Shiny new WordPress site! Very happy with it right now but will probably tweak pages etc over the next few weeks. Now my website and blog can all be in one seamless glorious place.

A little plugin called Blogger Importer doesn’t appear to be working, so at present I can’t import my old posts. If you’d like to see them, they’re still here.

WordPress is great for several reasons – it’s w3 compatible and very search-engine friendly. Disparity of appearance between various browsers is limited, and this and the fact it’s prettified using Cascading Style Sheets mean that, provided they know their CSS, designers have maximum control over how a site looks.

This is the first site I’ve designed using WP, but I have a few more in the pipeline – watch this space.