Jan 01

Redesign 2009

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Published:
5:45pm on Thursday 1st January, 2009

Looking back through my archives, the last time this site was redesigned was back in November 2005. That fairly successful design served me well for the last three years, but since the beginning of 2008 I’ve been itching to redesign. And, finally, I’ve managed to see a new design through to actual launch.

Goodbye Textpattern; Hello ExpressionEngine

The biggest change is in the application that powers the site. Textpattern was a reliable and free blog engine, but I’ve long desired to join the ExpressionEngine jet-set, and the last month of building this site has convinced me that it is a great choice for any project that needs a CMS of any description (possibly with the exception of an online shop - the e-commerce module is not exactly fully-featured, although I’m sure they are working on improvements with the impending release of version 2.0).

Speaking of EE 2.0, I’m now looking forward to the rewritten, CodeIgniter-powered ExpressionEngine even more than before. The opportunity to use my existing experience and knowledge of the CI framework to build and extend sites powered by EE opens up a whole new avenue of freelance work to PHP coders like me.

Small pieces, loosely joined

This particular design is relatively new, having begun life as a notebook sketch in mid-November. The idea to bring together the various streams of data I’m generating - Twitter, Flickr, All Consuming, Last.fm - is much older, but by no means original; there are several ‘lifestream’ applications around now, but I’d much rather present an aggregated view of my online activity on my own domain, rather than a third-party site such as Chi.mp.

The external services are imported via cURL scripts that run periodically to retrieve XML data via their respective APIs. Each script either inserts data directly into the ExpressionEngine weblog tables, or writes to flat HTML files for inclusion in my templates. At least, that was the idea; unfortunately I’m having some issues with PHP versions at the moment, so an interim solution will have to be swiftly coded tomorrow.

Evolution

I always like to see how other designers work, so in case anyone feels the same way and is interested in seeing how the design evolved, here is a short animation of the stages through which the homepage went, from wireframe to final version:

animated design progression

I'd love to hear what you think - please use the form below to leave your comments. Some HTML is permitted: b, i, em, del, ins, strong, pre, code, blockquote, abbr. URLs or email addresses will be automatically converted into links.

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  1. simon r jones's Gravatar

    simon r jones at 3:37pm on 4th January, 2009 #

    excellent new design Matthew, I like the stream of data on the homepage and the overlapping elements on the page layout. The evolving design is a nice inclusion, though I think I prefer the lower-case logo from one of your earlier revisions.

    Your Twitter status also just told me you said nothing 14,000 days ago which makes some kind of sense since that’s before you were born!! It seems to have popped back to normal now :-)

  2. MClogoID's Gravatar

    MClogoID at 5:40am on 11th February, 2009 #

    i always love the brown shade. so definitely I love your new design!but i prefer the header with the white and large font title.. hmm

  3. oyun indir's Gravatar

    oyun indir at 4:59pm on 9th August, 2009 #

    good archive