Tag: Web Design

What’s inspiring me

AdamSchwabe.com: a wonderfully clean, minimalist site. Not just in the look; note that a lot of common blog functionality is missing: Category listings or tag cloud? Browsable archives? Blogroll? It has none of these things, and doesn’t especially need them. What it does have is a beautiful and effective navigation scheme that uses colour to let you know exactly where you are, and a layout that lets the eye flow naturally to the content. Hey, that’s what you get when the author’s a user interface designer. AdamSchwabe.com teaches me that less is indeed more.

Plus, it’s what introduced me to colourlovers.com, so bonus points there.

Avalonstar:distortion is the total opposite in many ways. It’s dark. It’s busy. But you know what? it works. The author puts in tons of fun little extra bits, from “Welcome to Avalonstar” in Japanese to the closing “</and this would be the end>” tag at the very bottom. The site is fun to read. If you can pull it off, more can definitely be more.

Mind you, a design is nothing without content, and the two above sites has it in spades. And that’s something else for me to work on (not that I haven’t already).

Elements: Architecture in detail. Not a website, but a book. The other day I was in The Book Warehouse on Davie, and this caught my eye right from the top shelf. Aside from the lovely shots of contemporary architecture, the book’s message is that the devil is in the details. For the whole to work, all the components have to be working first.

Oh, and that day I also bought Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, Terry Pratchett’s Nation, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. They didn’t have The Wee Free Men, though. Bummer.

Geography

A little while back I wrote that, in the blog’s new version, I’d be proudly displaying my daily pictures of Sunset Beach in the sidebar. This is still the plan. And with a much wider layout it’s absolutely feasible. But in the last few days of figuring out widgetizing sidebars (two of them), installing a few more plugins, deciding on all the right navigation aids and so on, I hadn’t really visualised how big a 240 x 180 image was. Stuck on top of the sidebar, I feel it’s becoming a focus point of the whole page.

I didn’t really see this coming, though I probably should have.

A little while back I wrote that, in the blog’s new version, I’d be proudly displaying my daily pictures of Sunset Beach in the sidebar. This is still the plan. And with a much wider layout it’s absolutely feasible. But in the last few days of figuring out widgetizing sidebars (two of them), installing a few more plugins, deciding on all the right navigation aids and so on, I hadn’t really visualised how big a 240 x 180 image was. Stuck on top of the sidebar, I feel it’s becoming a focus point of the whole page.

Which… is not a bad thing, actually. I’ve been thinking for a while that my blog would become less focused on posts, and more on my current projects and photography. But I hadn’t fully grasped how the layout would have to change with the content. And frankly, I still don’t. This is very new to me, and I’m still feeling my way across the weird, wonderful landscape of Web design.

Tagging

I’ve been reading this very excellent blog full of tips and info about Wordpress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.

I’ve been reading this excellent blog full of tips and info about WordPress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.

Since I switched to WordPress for the current version, I’ve been using categories and not tags. For a while I tried to get a hierarchy of categories, but I just couldn’t decide on the right one. And the end result is a very unbalanced list. “Comics” and “Life” have quite a few posts, while “Music” has two. That never felt right to me. On one hand, it was a constant nudge that maybe I could blog a bit more and flesh out these sparse topics, but I never really got around to it. So the nudge became more “annoyance” than “inspiration.”

The other problem was, a lot of my posts fit into more than one category. What was the point, if a post didn’t fit into a clear hierarchy?

Now I’ve gotten (back) on Flickr, and discovered the joy of tags. And I realize that I don’t actually need categories. If readers want to browse through my blogs, tags will work just as well—along with my Google custom search engine, of course, and all the other Web 2.0 doodads I’ve just started tinkering with.

Of cherry blossoms and insecurities

I’ve just finished the Easter theme for the VGVA site. It’s been a fun and challenging experience, improving my skills and deepening my understanding of many Illustrator features. Pushing the envelope, that’s what it’s all about.

I’ve just finished the Easter theme for the VGVA site. It’s been a fun and challenging experience, improving my skills and deepening my understanding of many Illustrator features. Pushing the envelope, that’s what it’s all about.

Plus, the kudos. Those are always good.

The header graphic was the most complex I’d done so far; in fact, the real challenge (in addition to figuring out the tools at my disposal) was having a clear idea of how the finished product should look. I had to make several changes to the colour scheme along the way and my first draft, was very rough: some rough Paintbrush daubs in place of cherry blossoms, and a few lines sketching out a tree. So the next step, naturally, was to add more details, make everything more realistic.

Or… was it? The problem was that (a) it’d be a lot of work, and (b) even if I pulled it off, it might not necessarily look that good anyways. Maybe realism was overrated; maybe an overabundance of little details would just overwhelm the viewer, and all I had to do was show the essence of cherry trees and Easter eggs and all that springtime goodness. (Granted, the eggs were the easy part.)

For the next few days I kept going back and forth between the two extremes. The fact is, I wasn’t that secure with my visual imagination (something I already blogged about) and so falling back on what my camera saw instead of creating my own interpretation seemed a safe solution.

Well, I think the final product works. I’m still not totally happy with it, but I’ve alway been my own worst critic, so take that with a grain of salt. At the moment I’m heroically resisting the urge to go back and tinker. I can’t find the reference right now, but some years ago I read a quote by Aldous Huxley about regret. He wrote that it was a mistake to continually go back and fiddle with your finished works. No matter how much you polished them they would always have flaws; at some point you just had to let go, learn from your mistakes, and go on to make whole new works. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do: identify what needs work, and then fix it in a later version. I probably can’t do much better right now. A year from now, though? Oh yeah.

Back to basics

Redesigning my site is always a special time. It’s a time to start fresh, re-examine all my assumptions and past decisions, ask the hard questions. It starts with the content. What should I keep? What should I add? What should I drop? Before I even get to work on the design, I need to know what I should be designing for.

Redesigning my site is always a special time. It’s a time to start fresh, re-examine all my assumptions and past decisions, ask the hard questions. It starts with the content. What should I keep? What should I add? What should I drop? Before I even get to work on the design, I need to know what I should be designing for.

My Queer History Project? Oh, it stays. Even if I didn’t have any incoming links to it, I’d keep it just because even after 10(!) years I’m still enormously proud of it. It’ll share the stage with the other Web design projects I’ve got going on: VGVA and Team Vancouver

Quotes? For years I used to have lots of quotes, several pages’ worth, including a ginormous one dedicated to the great Terry Pratchett. I decided to drop them in the current version, but I keep going back and forth on it. Thing is, I’m just not sure how to incorporate them in the design. Should I have a random quote in the sidebar? Or a whole, separate page? I still don’t know. Very few of the blogs I’ve seen have have them, so… well, we’ll see. I don’t have to decide today.

Photo thumbnails in the sidebar? Sure thing. I’ll have to find new WordPress plugins to handle Flickr. So far I haven’t seen any that’ll do exactly what I want it to (display a block of square thumbnails just like the Gallery plugin does), but I’m sure it’s out there. Or I’ll do it myself.

In addition to those thumbnails, I plan to show my daily shot of Sunset Beach. Yes, I’ve been keeping that up, though there are a few gaps. Good news for me, Flickr can create slideshows from sets, so I don’t need to futz around in iMovie. Showing off my daily photo will keep me motivated, and provide a bit of regular fresh content.

Twitter and junk? Well, I don’t twitter. Maybe I should? If nothing else, Twitter and Lifestreams and such would be another good way to add content on a regular basis. Why not? My site started out with “essays,” long pieces that took weeks or months to write. Then I moved on to blogging: smaller, more frequent updates. Maybe micro-blogging is the next logical step.

Speaking of which, part of me is still deciding if I want to keep the stuff I wrote “pre-blog,” dating back to 1997. They’re WordPress pages instead of posts, since I don’t have exact publication dates for most of them, and I don’t want to just invent some. Picky, maybe, but that’s just my thing. Part of me is considering dropping the large archive page listing every single post/essay, and doing with category/tag pages (more on tags in a later post). Or maybe monthly archives, but a master list is feeling more and more unwieldy to me. In that case, I’d have to come up with a special page for older writing (like I briefly did, while designing the present version), or drop it entirely.

Decisions, decisions…

To Flickr or not to Flickr

Way back when, as I started to work on my site’s present design, I made a conscious decision not to use Flickr. The disadvantages, as I saw them, were: (a) I couldn’t style it, (b) current incoming links would be broken, and (c) I wouldn’t have access stats. Turns out (c) is not true, (b) doesn’t really apply since I don’t think I have any incoming links to my photos, and (a) is actually not that big a deal.

Way back when, as I started to work on my site’s present design, I made a conscious decision not to use Flickr. The disadvantages, as I saw them, were: (a) I couldn’t style it, (b) current incoming links would be broken, and (c) I wouldn’t have access stats. Turns out (c) is not true, (b) doesn’t really apply since I don’t think I have any incoming links to my photos, and (a) is actually not that big a deal. Hey, I had fun styling my galleries (and fighting with Smarty templates, and learning my way around Gallery’s user interface, which isn’t all that friendly), but I don’t need to do it anymore. Flickr offers much more flexibility in organising my photos, a snazzy interface, rich tagging and metadata, and—more importantly—tons of exposure.

I’m in the process of republishing my galleries on Flickr. All new photos will go directly there.

Oh, and I’ve started another site redesign. It was about time, don’t you think? No details yet, except I am planning to expand the width from 800 to 1000 px. Hah, and what will I do with all that extra space?

I am abuzz with ideas

So, funny story. Shortly after writing this post, I emailed the board chair, asking that a site redesign be put on next meeting’s agenda. He totally agreed, and in fact had already been planning to discuss the website (which I now feel I can name). They were going to redesign it last year, but the guy who volunteered got too busy. Which means I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes, so bonus there.

So, funny story. Shortly after writing this post, I emailed the board chair, asking that a site redesign be put on next meeting’s agenda. To my surprise he totally agreed, and in fact had already been planning to discuss the website (which I now feel I can name). They were going to redesign it last year, but the guy who volunteered got too busy. Which means I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes, so bonus there.

We had our board meeting this week and I made a little presentation, complete with screenshots of the current site, other gay volleyball sites, and of my own working copy I’d been fiddling with for the last couple of weeks. It was extremely well received, if I do say so myself; I even got compliments from that one board member who’s notoriously hard to please and easily bored. Go me!

I am tremendously excited about this project. It’ll be a great challenge for me but I already have lots of ideas, and can’t wait to test and refine them, pit them against each other in Darwinian competition. Fear me, for I am the God of Web design evolution!

Carpe Crisitunitatem

I’ve got a dilemma. Well, it’s not really a dilemma, more me working up the nerve to do something.

I’ve got a dilemma. Well, it’s not really a dilemma, more me working up the nerve to do something.

See, I’ve just joined the executive board of this organisation (which shall remain nameless right now, but I’ve been a member for several years), and I’m thinking of offering my services to redesign their website. The look & feel is kind of flat and dated (IMO), I’ve got issues with some aspects of the structure and navigation scheme, and there are various little details that need work. Now, it’s not a big site, but it does get a fair amount of exposure. So part of me’s asking, Am I being presumptuous here? How much do I really know about Web design? Sure, I read a lot of designers’ blogs, but I’ve got exactly two sites under my belt: this one right here, plus another one for an online RPG I’m no longer a part of, that I redid maybe six years ago. That’s it. Just two. Not a great portfolio. A lot of people will be judging this, and judging me on it. Am I really up for this challenge?

Stupid insecurities. The answer, in case you’re wondering, is: yes. Yes, I feel up to this challenge. I think I’m right to propose it, and I think I’d do a good job. Besides, if I don’t give it a shot, I’ll always be wondering “what if.” So there you go.

(The title, incidentally, is pseudo-Latin for “Seize the crisitunity”—which, as Homer Simpson has taught us, is the Chinese word that means both “crisis” and “opportunity.”)

File sorta not found

Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.

First, Wordpress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.

Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.

First, WordPress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.

The status code was only part of the problem, though. See, what WordPress does when you use custom URL rewrites (as I do) is, if the requested URL doesn’t map to an existing file, the request is redirected to a custom error page. The annoying side effect is that as far as the server is concerned, a file was delivered correctly and no error is logged. Which messes up my stats. Fortunately, there’s a solution: a WP plugin called Redirection. It handles 30* redirections as well as keeping a log of 404 errors. The former isn’t necessary for now, since only gallery & photo URI’s have changed—and I have to use .htaccess to handle those, since they’re outside WordPress, but the latter is a godsend. Not a perfect solution, since in a perfect world I shouldn’t even have to use workarounds, but I’m very happy with it.

Oh, and AWStats (the stats package I’m using) was counting each browsed page twice. Seems a gallery page (.php, which is counted as a page view and not just a hit) is called in the background to build the photo grid displayed in the sidebar. Fortunately AWStats allows you to ignore certain pages, and this won’t be a problem in the future.