My Experiences In Web Design: Part 1
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(This article is the first in an ongoing series about my first experiences with redesigning some of my sites and blogs. This is a live series meaning that the redesigns haven’t been deployed yet but are in development. Each article in the series is a step in the development process as it is happening.)
I’ve never been into web design all that much. In fact I’ve only had a web presence for about 4 years now. I went through my entire computer science education without even having a homepage! It’s not something I’m proud of but I’m not ashamed of this fact either. My friends and classmates all maintained at least one weblog, but I just never saw the point of it. The web wasn’t the same place it is now and design certainly wasn’t important.
Fast forward. I’ve slowly been seduced by the web. But like quite a few other technical people who have a web presence, I’ve neglected design. I’m guilty. Site and blog design really haven’t been on my mind until lately. Design neglect is especially easy for a blog. I mean you just install one of the pre-made themes, tweak the code a little and you’re ready to go. This is what happened to me.
Is Website and Blog Design Important?
Well the short answer for me is a resounding yes. I think it is especially important if you want to eventually create a brand. This is something I’m in the process of doing. Now I know all eye-candy and fluff for content isn’t going to cut it either. I do believe good content is crucial. But there are some sites I visit just because I like the design. It’s just something about sites that have a really compelling theme or design that just keeps me going back.
After seeing so many inspiring designs on the web, I decided that I needed to have custom designs for some of my sites as well and eventually redesign all of them. And I didn’t just want a custom theme that other people on the web can buy. I wanted a unique theme that complements my branding process. I noticed that these types of designs are fairly expensive and web designers can charge up to thousands of dollars. Well I’m an endless tinkerer and so I decided to try my hand at it. I mean if I mess things up or develop a design that just doesn’t work at least it was a good learning experience.
Case Study: 99Drawings:100Days Blog
Design I’m not happy with:
I decided that the first site that I was going to redesign was my drawing site. I considered this blog dead for a while and had just left it to languish. Let me make it clear that I never stopped drawing. Drawing is a passion. I just stopped updating the site. However one day out of curiosity I decided to check how many subscribers I had for the site. I was expecting to have none, but I had quite a few and I was getting several hundred unique page views a day and I wasn’t even maintaining the site! And on top of this the site was still generating passive income. I was kind of amazed.
I’m Going To Design My Own Site
It was at this moment I decided that I was going to redesign 99drawings:100days first and foremost because if people were still coming to my site then I wanted them to see my latest artwork and how I was progressing. And the secondary reason was that since it was already generating income, why not redesign the site to add value so the stream would continue and possibly increase. I am certainly not opposed to passive income. Also I decided to take my time with the redesign to work out all the kinks.
I had no idea what was involved in making a custom site that is visually pleasing. I’m type of person who needs a clean house to be productive at my office at home so it follows that the same would be true on the web. I need an organized space where I can feel inspired and compelled to do work without worrying things like layout. Now I know that quite a few people may disagree with me on this point saying that you just need to produce more and better content. My answer to this is that all people work differently and what is a requirement for one might not be a requirement for another.
I consider myself to be an artistic person so I was confident that I could make the site look good. Since the site is constantly being updated with drawings, I decided to build it around the wordpress content management system. For the graphics, being the linux user that I am, I knew I would be using GIMP to create all the graphics. I didn’t want to go with the typical web 2.0 look. I wanted something more organic. When you go to my drawing website you should get a feel for the type of artist I am. Basically my site design should reflect my artistic sensibilities and not just be a place where I just put some of my drawings.
Put It On Paper
From my programming experience I knew that I needed to get the basic design drawn up before designing or coding. The first thing I did was put a design for the site on paper without any regard for what it would take to implement so I would not not limit vision for the site. After I had the site design on paper, I started experimenting in GIMP. This is the point where I discovered the site design was going to require more than a weekend of development time. Also because of my lack of forethought for implementation, I was going to have to make some compromises on the design and implementation. My paper design is more of a site structure design design than really how I want to site to look graphically. Here are some roughs of my design on paper.
Check back for Part: 2 when I will discuss how my paper design is realized in GIMP.
KJ
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SDA said:
Looks like the trusty black minima theme everyone used to have (including SDA) you might want to chop at a magazine theme in WP or try joomla if you don’t want to hardcode everything.
August 21st, 2008 at 3:22 am -
kj said:
Thanks for commenting, yeah I can see where you get that from the design. But that was just the structural design. The initial graphic design I just implemented in GIMP is a has I different feel based on textures. I’ll be posting about it soon and will be documenting what coding issues I come across. And yes, the theme will be chopped around wordpress although in the future as a project I would like to get it running on my own set of scripts.
Thanks,
KJ
August 21st, 2008 at 6:23 am
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