A very strange thing happened during the design of this particular iteration of the ‘kode. Usually speaking I’ll be thinking about if for months, then I’ll see something on the internet and get depressed because I can never get that good and then I’ll begrudgingly try and plow through coding I really have no right playing around with in the first place, simply because if I can, I will be making a dog’s dinner out of it.

The Fairground So when I first jumped into the redesign something like 20 odd days ago I had it in my head that I was planning on making the most insane, loudest fucking thing on the internet (ok a bit of hyperbole there but that’s what was going through my head). The louder (and I mean in terms of colour and typography) the better. I was going to have loads of links everywhere. I was going to draw every single section of the damn thing, to hell with how long it was going to take people to load the site, that’s why you’ve got broadband I tried convincing myself.

As I plowed through the design, spending hours simply staring at what I had in front of me, in an attempt to make it more coherent, make it more explosive, make it more loud, I let it rest for a few hours and went and played basketball. When I got back it was as if I understood that I was going down the completely wrong road for this design. For some reason simplicity and ease of upgrading and actually understanding all the code that I was slapping down became far more important to me. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t even 40% finished with this design, it didn’t matter that I’d spent days on the design either, what matters was the Euerka moment that I felt there and then.

The Showcase It dawned upon me (yeah I know it took a fucking long while, after 8 months) that what people associated and liked about the previous site wasn’t the design or the typography, the thing that made it stand out was my artwork. Sadly because I’m too busy not happy completely with my site I don’t get the chance to draw more. This redesign is aimed at that idea, getting to draw more. I will say that the turning point was the showcase idea. Here I could use the entire page as my canvas. I could highlight everything I wanted to highlight right on the front page with the minimum amount of effort. I just change a jpg and edit a single file if I’m feeling inclined to add more information about the artwork behind.

The design The design itself is not a million miles away from most blog website out there. The real difference here is that I’m playing the grid as precicely as I can. All I could think about was maintaining a grid throughout the entire design, luckily for me it was a super simple design so there wasn’t much to worry about, but it’s all in the details.

I’ve kept my philosophy for the archives as well. Keep it simple. I completely understand all the code that is behind the functions found here and can easily manipulate them to do with as I please; which is once again a supremely inviting reason to have a super simple website. Traditionally in the past I would have been running out of steam by the time I got around to dealing with the archives, so this was a breathe of fresh air to actually want to make something of the archives both visually and from a usability point of view. I’ve not completed the work there, as I’ve still got the tags page and the categories pages to deal with as well (however those shouldn’t be too far behind).

Updating I’m intrinsically lazy when it comes to up updating the site with tweaks here and there. The reason behind once again is the messy code. The code that at the time I thought was pretty tight was in fact a bit of a mess. The design depended on plugins far too much and I can’t say that it was adding that much to the usability of the site itself. With that thought in mind, I attacked this design by stripping everything. Anything that was getting in the way was gone. Simple was the way forward. So on the front page all you get are the posts, the titles and how many comments have been made to each post. If you want any other information you’re going to have to jump back into the individual page and get that information. The entire idea behind this design is to add a bit of class to the site, which I believe although had some good intentions was lacking a coherent structure, and the attention to detail was sadly lacking. This design aims to address this problems by making the maintenance slightly more manageable.

WordPress on Fire I’ve been using WordPress for a good long while now and I’ve got to say with the sheer amount of work that’s been done out there by 1000s of people, there is nothing that you can think of that someone hasn’t thought of before (unless you’re Michael, don’t know where he mines his ideas from). What’s also great is that the resources out there to help you sift through everything is astounding. It’s actually my favourite toy at the moment because it really delivers everything I want and in the way I want it with the minimum amount of fuss. So I bow down to Matt and the entire WordPress dev team and especially to the 1000s of people that make up the WordPress Community, you guys rock.

No CoCo? Don’t be silly, he’ll be back and pretty soon, once we get this CSS Reboot malarkey over and done with then we can move on to concentrating on sketches and whatnot. I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff coming up for CoCo, so don’t you worry, he’ll be back.

Special shout out Usually when I start a redesign I pick up Manji or Rin and start hacking away. Certain things are ready for me, however looking at the code found in there, I’ve got to say that a lot of work is really needed to bring that theme up to speed with the rest of the themes out there, except I know if I jump back into that field it will really take a long time/ Thankfully there’s Fauna. Fauna by Joen IMHO should become the WordPress default. Why? Because it’s supremely easy to understand and Joen has seriously made it clever. The most time consuming part of making a theme for WordPress I found was sorting out the single post pages, with all the comments and the comment forms and the implemenation for the trackbacks etc. It just gets a bit ridiculous. So Joen’s efforts have been supremely amazing to have and while the last time round he helped me out with the code, this time he did one better and gave me his site :).

I want to also give a shout out to all the fine folks at 9rules who will always help out whenever they can which is brilliant and for the loads of inspiration they give me each and every month and to everyone who helped me whether they knew it or not, so people like Phu, Joen, Shawn, Michael, Kyle, Podz and the list goes on to be honest.

Final Word Is the site complete? No, it never is. Ask anyone out there when they think they’re site is 100% complete or if it’s perfect and I doubt they’ll say it ever is. Just because there’s always something you can do. I’ve learnt to understand that point (once again it’s taken a bit of time) but it’s all part of learning and at least now I can say I’ve laid down some decent Foundations (which also is the name of this particular design).

Do excuse the mess I'm still tidying up. That goes for my code and my site and links, shouldn't be too long though.