Today I'm launching an entirely new web site, fully rebuilt from the ground up. After nearly five years of the previous design, it's time for something new. I've been wanting to do this for a while but these things take time, and I haven't been able to find that time until recently.
So what's new? It's all about the design. Although I've edited the content somewhat, mostly what I've been doing is updating the look and feel of things to something more current. I didn't even know about the CSS Reboot event that took place on May 1 until yesterday, but that's more or less what I'm doing here. The old site was in desperate need of some updating, and that update is finally here.
The original site design was done in hand-coded HTML. No stylesheets were used. I'm pretty sure they existed in 2002 but I certainly didn't know anything about them. Can you say <table>, kiddies? I knew you could. And yeah, it was all static files, uploaded to the web server with FTP.
Old site designI don't actually have a screenshot of the original site, but this screenshot is not far off. Initially the site was all about Macaroni, and so the site reflected that. Last year I updated it so that I could add MondoMouse and Chimey, adding a separate home page but otherwise not changing the design any more than necessary.
After I'd been using the site for a while, I came to the now-obvious conclusion that dealing with a bunch of static HTML files was no fun at all. Needing something better, I settled on Drupal, an open-source content management system. I decided to make the updated Drupal-based web site resemble the original as closely as possible, and one custom Drupal theme later I was up and running with it. Well, one custom theme and a custom Drupal module, but in retrospect the reasons for the module are kind of bizarre and so I won't embarrass myself by explaining them.
Drupal has been really, really nice and so this new site design is using the latest version. It's a great update from the creaky old one I'd been using for so long. A common question among Mac developers is how best to go about setting up their web site, so in my next post I'll talk some more about why I use Drupal and the reasons you might want to either use it or avoid it.
