Web redesign excitement!

Sandra and I stumbled across the new CNCH website yesterday (it’s gorgeous by the way), and it inspired me to TOTALLY rethink my concept for my website.  I had been thinking about using WordPress for a set of static pages, but their presentation is fresh (totally different from the old site) and totally cool.  Now I’m thinking about ways to add rotating content, put new content at the top, highlight recent work and work in progress, and a WHOLE lot of other stuff.  And (after investigating other options) I’m definitely going to be using WordPress…it’s simple to use, relatively easy to edit, and a lot more friendly to the web designer/nontechnical user than Drupal.

I was so excited, in fact, that I woke up at 2am and couldn’t get back to sleep until I had scrawled down some of my ideas on paper.  Sadly, no scanner, so I can’t put it into the computer, but here is a sampling of what I intend to do:

• Organize in 7-8 sections with a link to each section at the top of the page
• Left-hand context sensitive menu in each section with links to each section’s content
• Homepage content contains:
  • Photo of most recently completed work, with link to that work’s page
  • Photo of works in progress, with teaser explanation and link to that piece’s page
  • Teaser for most recent blog entry
  • Random photo of previously completed work, linking to that piece’s page
• Each piece will have a page with explanatory text, photos, links to blog entries about that piece, etc.
• Image galleries with optional slideshows

Now, of course, I have to go through the list of WordPress plugins and see which of those items can be done with existing plugins.  Needless to say, I will be adapting requirements around what is achievable.

This is a huge undertaking, and I wouldn’t dare try it at all, but the Scrum framework gives me the option of breaking it down into smaller, more manageable bits, so I’m just looking at a series of small hills rather than a giant mountain.  The first step will be to get the basic homepage put together, which means selecting a theme (I’m leaning towards Atahualpa, as it looks both popular and very flexible) and starting to research how to get various types of content to display in WordPress.

A long slog, but who knows?  It might pan out, and then I’d get a new website.  And that would be very cool indeed.

I’ll be building the new website at my alternate URL, tienchiu . com, for those who feel like tracking the progress.  Up until now it’s simply pointed at travelingtiger.com, but it’s a nice place to build the new site.  It will also give me the opportunity to work with a new hosting provider, Dreamhost – which hopefully will be more friendly and reliable than Omnis.com, my current hosting provider (have been unhappy for awhile and would NEVER work with them again).

It’s funny – a lot of my thoughts on the design have been heavily influenced by Weavolution.  I didn’t think that Weavolution design was going to be so applicable to other things, but looking back on it, it’s amazing how much I learned about web design along the way.