Site Upgrades and Updates

The site gets its annual design update.

The upgrade went fairly well, as these things go. If you are still seeing the old site or are seeing a messy hybrid, trying hitting “Refresh” in your browser a couple of times. That should clear things up.

Whenever I change the look of the site I am always asked why (and tend to receive plenty of negative feedback as well!). There are a few reasons for this upgrade. As I explained a little while ago, there are three main ones: a) I am easily bored with my designs, b) the sites serves, in part, as a gateway to my web design company and it is important to keep it looking fresh or c) the nature of the site changes a bit over time and there is something I wish to emphasize that cannot easily be done with the current design. All of these reasons have come together this time. Especially, though, I’ve had to prepare for the lead-up to the book, knowing that I’ll need to make the book available through the site and begin to “promote” it in some way. I think the new design lends itself to that task a little better. I am also considering integrating my company site with the blog.

The new design offers some new features that were also integral to the decision to switch. For example, I’ve now added tags to posts and this should serve as a good way of tying posts together and of quickly categorizing them. I’ve also added more features for those of you who use various social media and who wish to interact with the content a little more. And I’ve transitioned to a better system of URLs (search engine friendly, for those who care). Finally, I’m preparing the site for the release of the new version of Movabletype, my blogging software, and think the new features and new design will work best with that new software.

Anyways, work continues. I’ll continue to find and weed out problems as they occur today. Please continue to be patient with me!

7:06 AM – Today is the day I’m going to be moving to a whole new design for this blog. So please bear with me as, for the next couple of hours at least, things could be a little flaky around here. Images may not work for a while, formatting will be strange, and so on. So hang tight and I’ll post when things are returning to normal.