The new IAMWW

If you are reading this in your feed reader, come on over and check out the new site.

I have been working off and on trying to redesign the site. However, I ended up with far more designs that I hated than ones I liked. The good news is, some of those mock-ups will eventually be made available as public WordPress themes.

The changes to the site

• Complete redesign
• I am now using Textpattern as a CMS
• Support for my WordPress themes have been moved from the comments on those pages to the IAMWW Forums

Things left to clean up and improve on

• RSS Feeds for comments- Doesn’t seem to work with current url structure
• Iron out all layout inconsistencies
• Clean up the CSS a little
• Improve the site speed with caching
• Convert the comment form from tables (maybe)
• Work out the kinks in getting the permalinks to match those I used with WordPress

This list looks pretty long, but I knew if I didn’t flip the switch today who knows when it would have went live. (These changes were originally planned to take place over the past holidays.)

I plan on improving the site more gradually than I have in the past as I dive deeper into TXP. I will also post more later on my reasons for switching and comparisons of experiences with TXP and WP.

So, what do you guys think?

• I love it! (36%, 5 Votes)
• It’s ok. (29%, 4 Votes)
• Needs improvement. (21%, 3 Votes)
• Where are the colors? (21%, 3 Votes)
• I hate it. (0%, 0 Votes) –

While the votes for “I love it” would win in a running race, it wouldn’t be by a country mile. The majority of the votes point to it’s ok, needs improvement and some color.

I agree.

I thought I wanted to make IAMWW a little more personal by adding links, photos, and other mixed media. But I don’t think it fits the site. I think it needs a little more polished design and content. The current design feels confining.

Robert Ellis (who I consider a mentor) recently said:

“I think part of the problem you’re having is that you haven’t really decided what you want your site to be about.”

He is exactly right. I am struggling with how to “brand” the site and what I really want the site to be about or even what I want to write about. When I first built the site I didn’t really plan on doing a whole lot of writing (and certainly wasn’t planning on designing WordPress themes). I merely wanted to build an easy to manage site quickly. Now I would like to write some posts, but I don’t see myself making a lengthy post everyday. I just don’t have time. So, that is when I thought about mixing in some quick posts and other mixed media. I think it works great on my family website, but I don’t believe it matches the content here.

I have spent the last few days thinking over the site and what direction in branding and writing I want to take it. I am going to mix things up. I want to keep the site somewhat technical or design based with the right mix of short posts. But rather than build it as a stream of conscience, life stream, or daily log, I am going to remove the “asides” from the typical flow of the home page. Also, I really don’t know about the title or description or if I will even continue to use one.

With all of that said:

I just finished up the layout for the homepage of my next theme. I think everyone (including myself) is going to like the next design much more than my current or even past designs.

Once the next design for the site is finished I hope to begin working on another theme for public release.

If there is any interest for a tumblelog-hybrid WordPress theme, maybe I can clean up the template files and release them for download…

Until the chaos fades, be sure to check out Brian Gardner’s latest site design!

Update: Also check out Robert’s new theme release Upstart Blogger Futurosity Altera.

The theme you see here is an early version of what ended up becoming Moo-Point for the Sandbox Design Competition. This is kind of a Moo-Point Lite. Unlike Moo-Point, I did edit some of the core Sandbox files.

I have reduced the overhead by compressing the CSS with gzip and getting rid of most of the JavaScript. I will probably miss the sliding drawer trick However, I may implement mootools or jQuery on the final design.

So please let me know your thoughts, comments and concerns on the current layout. Did you like the last one better?