The Redesign

The day I've been working towards for over a year has finally arrived: I have launched a complete redesign of my web site.

I had two primary goals for the redesign: first, a totally new look, something that wasn't rushed and wouldn't grow tiresome a few weeks later; and second, a custom content management system that let me use my site the way I wanted to, not get in the way. The style and layout was the lengthiest part of the process. Having two jobs and a family means a distinct lack of copious free time. Trying to sustain a creative flow long enough to assemble a design that satisfied my first goal was very difficult. Frequently there were long periods between work sessions, but a side effect I found was that I was able to view previous work with a little more objectivity. I scrapped probably a half dozen designs or more over the first 4 months.

Around December or January I had a design that I was pleased with and started working on markup and CSS. However that design looked very little like what you see today. After SXSW, I refined the layout grid and on a hunch reversed some colors. I think I dreamt about the idea to dig up some of my old photography from my senior year art show and incorporate it into the design. It was probably as I was falling asleep one night. That decision led to this final design that I'm very content with. I also repurposed the title of my show, 'The Air in Between,' for the site.

The other half of the site, the back-end, was equally exciting and really a lot less work. I used the Django framework which is built on Python. Django is an incredible tool for web development, and I use it whenever and wherever I can. At Blue Rocket Studios, Python with Django is now our primary language and framework (having left ColdFusion and PHP behind). At Biola we're beginning to move to Django from ColdFusion. Loosely put, it removes all the repetitive, mindless and tedious work from the development process and lets you quickly get to what matters: writing HTML templates and CSS. Without a framework like Django, you'd spend dozens (or hundreds) of hours writing all the code to work with database and create screens to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data.

I may write a separate entry about the Django code behind this site because it really was fun to handcraft the foundation and functionality according to what I wanted to be able to do.

The final time-consuming component was all the detail work. I spent so much time on the home page and main pages that I was kind of caught off-guard by all the other views and templates that I just hadn't thought about. And then all these needed CSS as well, and it felt like it would never end. This is where my busy schedule was brutal. If I had more than two hours at one time to devote to the site, it was very productive. That was rare though and I felt like I was continuously just getting back up to speed with what needed to be done and never actually making headway.

But at long last, it's here. With a couple of exceptions: I need to import past comments into my database, and I need to finish setting up the redirects for the old URL scheme. And there are still a lot of little details, but I'll get to them later, not right now.

One last important detail: a good hosting company is hard to find, and I found a gem through the recommendation of Jeff Croft — WebFaction. Timely and friendly support, a robust and easy-to-use control panel, great features, and access to the Apache instance make for the best experience — by far — I've had with a web host. If you're in the market, and especially if you're looking to run apps like Django, Subversion, or Trac, I highly recommend them.

Feedback is very welcome. Thanks for reading.