The Redesign

Well, it's been a couple of days that I have been living with the new look of the site, and the new upgraded blogging software.  I like to live with my designs for a few days before really judging them too much, and this one is no exception.

The Design: The design is fairly commercial, and it's not the most original in the world, I stole the background, and kinda the general boxy bordered look and feel from some other site(s) floating around the web.  Shame on me, but ya know, fuck it....I don't have time to be totally creative anymore.  All my sites would look like they were from the 90's if I was still doing them from scratch.  What your aunt hilda's couch with the plastic protector cover on it is to interior design, an original site by Hank is to web design, capishe?

In any case, while I do lean heavily on other well designed sites for layout, I like to do the actual work myself, cutting and pasting only makes you stupider.  This time around I had my shiny new edition of Expression Web 2 that I was dying to get knee deep into.  I love this tool!  Can't say that enough, it's worlds ahead of Frontpage and all the nonsense that came before it.  For starters, there is a layout picker tool to get you started.  You can choose a simple page, one with a header/content/footer layout, chooses sidebars, menu divs, the whole deal is right there for you.  Choose one, and your blank page is rendered with divs and style sheets and it all works like BAM!  I love that.  And it's repeatable, very important.

One other nice feature that it has is the split design/code view.  This is nice, but I do most of my work in the code screen...because well....because, and before I can see the results of my painfully slow typing, I need to click somewhere in the design screen to wake it up and tell it to re-render.  I find this very annoying, and a keyboard shortcut that does that would be very nice, so I don't have to touch my mouse.  Hmmm...just realized that I'm talking tools, and not design, but seriously, the tool IS that good.

OK, so the site.  Wanted to condense the landing page and spice it up a bit.  The big image tword the top there is something I can trade out from time to time, and will probably carry a message and a link to the post I most care about at any given moment.  I like that. The current C-63 AMG interior is just a reminder as to why I need to get my ass in gear, it's my current car crush,  I'll go into why in a later post.  Suffice it to say, I want one, and it's my site, so I put it there.

You will also notice the glaring ad space off to the right.  I don't know how to pull this off and have it look good.  I want ads, why not?  I made $12 off them so far, and who knows, maybe someday, someday, that could be $20.  The problem is that I can't control what Adwords sends me, and often it's some silly thing that just looks like shit, is all yellow or blue, and clashes very dramaticly with my general look and feel.  Might have to switch to text or something.  Wouldn't mind video, that might work.

Below that I have my Twitter updates, I think those are cool, and I'm totally down with how that looks.  I'm also excited about the little images next to my posts, I think those are pretty cool.  Good way to introduce some color.

The Platform: The software I'm using to drive this puppy is Blog Engine .Net, and I have to say that I am pretty happy with it to date.  I could have moved this to Community Server or Graffiti, but chose to stick with DNBE.  It's simple, has some cool extensibility points, uses XML files as a database, which makes upgrading a cut and paste scenario from a data perspective.  Overall it's just clean and performant.  Been using it for over a year, and I love it.  Even got Nate Church using it, and he loves it too.  It's just nice not having to deal with SQL server for something as paltry as tracking the content of my silly little blog.  Sometimes as developers I think we take SQL Server for granted, I mean seriously, all that power to manage this?  Although, this latest version of DNBE does come with a SQL provider and database script, I aint havin it.  When performance becomes an issue, amybe, but right now I relish the simplicity.

[imgbullet]C63.png (13.97 kb) [/imgbullet]