New Design in Progress
My new book is doing well, so I have some time to work on my sites. Here at Perishable Press, I’ll be working on a redesign, refreshing some older content, and posting some new articles.
I have some specific goals in mind. As you may know, there are 23 alternate themes available for viewing the site. Although I still think it’s a neat idea to have all those previous themes available, their presence over-complicates the process of redesign. For example, one of the earlier alternate themes has a post-content width of 500px, and another applies wide padding and borders to images, which means that I’m limited to maximum width of 470 pixels for images. Keep in mind that the site is eight years old and includes a LOT of images, graphics, and all sorts of miscellaneous coding debris. Think virtual pandora’s box and you’ve got the idea.
So that’s the primary goal: remove the alternate themes and start completely fresh with a new design. The next big goal is to remove some of my crazier older content and refresh some out-of-date stuff with better information. In general I don’t enjoy removing content, but I’ve found that it’s increasingly necessary to keep up with my own processes and the rapid evolution of the Web. In fact, I’ve already taken down five or so of my pet-project sites simply because I never have time to look at them. Eventually I’d like to consolidate all of my projects, sites, and time spent online into a single beam of productivity. Things have been much too scattered, but it’s getting better, and refreshing and streamlining Perishable Press will be another step in that direction.
Beyond the redesign and content refresh, I want to get back into posting regularly on web design, development, security and so forth. That means new PHP and jQuery tutorials, more .htaccess tricks, and the inevitable 6G Blacklist. I’ll try to keep the articles well explained here at Perishable Press, although I do intend to write more openly and directly to help facilitate the creative process. For shorter posts, micro-tuts, and code snippets, I’ll be posting at WP-Mix, and additionally posting some fresh WordPress content at Digging into WordPress.
Again, this work is possible because of the awesome people who provide support via advertising, donations, or buying my books. So a huge THANK YOU to those who help make it a reality :)
5 responses to “New Design in Progress”
I like the design of WP-Tao…Did u use Genesis 2 ?
Nope, I rarely use any Genesis stuffs
Thanks for the update Jeff, been coming here for awhile now and I can’t wait to see what to see the next design!
And for as long as I been coming here I never new you could change themes…. 23, dam, that has to be a nightmare of code to maintain.
Congratz on the new book!
It’s good to hear from you, Brian!
Yes it was a nightmare, you absolutely get the idea. Hopefully it makes the next design a bit less complex and time-consuming :)
Cheers!
Every great websites need redesign.. I like it :)