Reinvention: Getting to Work

May 02, 2006 | 18 Comments

This is the second in a series of posts documenting and exploring my online reinvention. See this post for more.

What’s gone before

• I’ve decided to lay Asterisk to rest.
• I’ve set down some goals for what I want with my new site
• I’ve tossed around some ideas

Time to work

I’m nearing a point where I’m ready to begin work on my site. I’ve refined my goals and have a pretty good idea of what I’d like to do with my new site. To keep this post simple I’ll talk about three different aspects of this project:

• Content. Which, for now, is basically features and information design.
• Technical. The CMS.
• Creative. The creative direction for my new site.

I’m not going to get into tons of detail, but I’d love to get your feedback on these ideas.

Content

I’ve narrowed down what I’d like to see on my new site. I took my goals, refined them and came up with a practical working list of “features” or “content areas” I’d like for the site. Here they are in rough order of priority.

Article area

The “blog” if you want. I don’t really have time any more for frequently updated posts so I’m really thinking of this more as almost weekly articles than I am blog posts. I’d like to pair each article with an image and give it lots of prominence on the home page.

Inspiration area

I’d like to bring back the sharing of inspiration on my site. This would usually be in the form of music, so I’d quickly showcase something I’m really into, with the occasional podcast. However, I don’t want to limit it to that. I’m thinking of a prominent area that’s flexible for whatever I want to show.

Portfolio

I’m not sure what I want to do here yet, but it’s been years since I’ve showcased my work on my own site. I’d like to bring that back.

Personal streams

I’d like an area for my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos and maybe something from Last.fm.

Etc.

I’ll need an archive, about page and other essentials.

Technical

I need to find a CMS that’ll do all of the above, which, considering it’s not all that complicated, I don’t think should be too hard. However I do have some other, pretty straight-forward, technical goals in mind.

• Spam-free. I’m sick and tired of dealing with spam. I’ve thought about eliminating comments all together, but I do want to keep the community aspect Asterisk has traditionally had. I may not rely on the CMS to deal with this and may set up some kind of comment moderation.
• Easy to set up and customize. I’m leaning towards sticking with MT because I know it and I don’t require a ton of features it can’t handle, but I’m going to explore other ideas. What I want is something that’s flexible yet not too hard to learn. Expression Engine is one I’m going to look at for sure.

Creative

Ah, here’s where it gets fun. I’ve done most of my thinking in this area because, well, it’s what gets me jazzed about this site. It is a personal outlet and I’d like to do something different creatively. One thing to note: I don’t plan on going way out there, I want the site to stay usable and readable as possible and I don’t want to introduce creative elements that take away from that.

Just like any good Web designer should.

However, one of my goals is for the site to express more of my personality and I’m going to try and do that here.

I’ve done lots of brainstorming, drawing, surfing, clip-cutting and observing. I’ve also done lots of introspective questioning. Here’s a quick creative brief, in list form, summarizing the direction I’ve come up with.

• Contradiction (I’m really very often of two minds about things. It’s part of my personality.)
• Primary colors (blue, red, yellow, black and white)
• Simple
• Rock and Roll
• Bold and colorful yet not overwhelming
• Strong (not big) typography
• More visual interest than I’ve got now
• Slightly off-grid
• Slightly aged or worn

Through all of this my underlining guideline is a slightly “dirty” visuals with clean and simple organization.

Next steps

I’m going to start by working out the layout for the article pages and work my way in. I’ll probably explore visual elements and the CMS along site that, but my first priority right now is to organize that information and get into specifics about what that various content will be and look like.

From there I’ll begin to code out some templates and visual style and seeing how I can fit this into a CMS that fits my needs.

Filed under: Reinvention
Keyword Tags: design+process web+design

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