Welcome to the New Site

Posted on April 26, 2009

In my last design the
approach was to focus most on the blog and little on anything else. Now I've switched back to concentrating on making Design Intellection a one-man web design shop and with that change comes a new design.

The way a site works is directly affected by its design; and if you don't build your site around its intended goal then it will never live up to its intended potential. Said a different way, neither form nor function follow one another, rather – quoting Frank Lloyd Wright – form and function should be one.

Instead of trying to cram new design elements into the frame- work of the old site, I rethought and rebuilt it. The old design never felt that polished to me anyways, so I didn't have to work hard to convince myself to redesign it.

Figure A. The interface for creating a new post in Habari.

To be honest I still haven't figured out exactly what I'm doing with this site. I expect it to always be changing and I'm gradually accepting that as an outgrowth of my personality.

Besides the visual aesthetics, another significant change is this site now uses Habari to publish content and no longer WordPress.

Initially there were two things that drew me to Habari: Its simplicity (see the new post interface thumbnail in Figure A) and its file naming hierarchy.

Habari has the ability to use a different template file for each post; you just need a file name that corresponds with the URL slug. So now each post has the potential for a completely unique layout. More thoughts on this are in the sidebar to the right.

I've been using WordPress since 2004. I remember as I was planning my site transfer from Blogger to my own domain name I sketched out a workflow of how I was going to manage each individual HTML file (I was old-school). Somehow I stumbled onto WordPress and began using it instead (wise move). Without recounting my entire web & blogging history, suffice to say, WordPress will always have a special place in my heart.

Discussion

In this new design, the ability to comment on a post for others to see has been removed. This was a hard one because I love hearing from you, but at the same time comment threads on blog posts are somewhat broken.

So I've kept the best part of commenting – communication – and have removed everything else. At the end of each post there's what looks like a normal comment form; however instead of publishing a comment, this form operates as a contact form and sends the comment directly to me (referencing the post from which it came).

Then, if need be, we can carry on a conversation via email.

My Promise

Finally, my promise to you is that I will never again publish a post with such a small measure!

If you look at some old posts you’ll notice that this layout is a little different from the standard post and page layout. With the help of Habari, CSS and grids, I’m taking the ‘Jason Santa Maria’ approach to blogging. Each blog post now has the potential for a completely unique layout (see the Vignelli post).

What I'm doing here is not groundbreaking, as just previously mentioned Jason Santa Maria has been doing it for a while, there's an Art Direction plugin for WordPress that will enable you to something similar and Jeff Croft used to do this a couple of years ago.

That being said, having the ability to design a blog post entirely different each time is, juvenilely speaking, a lot of fun. I've always had a problem with thinking of a new design and then letting that thought – those sketches – pollute my affection towards whatever current design I have employed.

Now I have an outlet. Of course not every post has to be different, there’s a standard template for posts and one for asides. Yet it's built in a way that allows for easily customizing the design of the entire post.

It's better this way, and in a sense it feels like this is how blogging should be. A marriage of the personal home page and the latest and greatest web software.