blue Filament Design

For a redesign...

No, not this site (not yet, anyway), but that of the School District of Haverford Township (current "old" version). Here is a sneak peak at the redesigned home page, which is currently undergoing testing before being officially launched.

The redesign is a culmination of about 10 months of thought and 3 days of work. I have literally been thinking of redesigning it since it came out last August. The issues ran from coding errors to usability issues to a fundamental flaw in how the site was designed and how the site was being administered. The new site corrects every single issue with semantic, valid, and accessible markup.

While I would like to get into the details of how all these issues developed, I will save that for another post. For now, all anyone needs to know is that this is how the site was meant to be, even if it took a whole year to get there. I'm excited to see it breath the light of day.

In business, it's always good to be busy, whether it's work you're getting paid for or working to improve your skills. Well, recently I've been busy finishing work I get paid for, which is nice when the checks come through. This past week, I was fortunate enough to have two web sites go live. That made me very busy, but the end results were worth it.

Read more...

Well, I've finally put together a design that I like for the new blue Filament Design site. The old design got old very fast. I had never really liked it, but put it up fast and left it alone while I completed a major project and finished renovating my home to a livable condition.

I had sworn to myself that once those two items were completed, I would redesign this site. The redesign isn't quite complete, but the old site was just so bad, that I've got to put this up now. I still have a few additions to make, specifically on the right sidebar. Those will be completed in the next day or two. My portfolio page will also be finished within the next day. It will display both my recently completed projects and projects I am working on. If you're reading this today, you may not be able to see the About page or the Contact page, but they'll be there by the end of the day.

I don't normally build a web site this way, but I have the time and very strongly felt that the old site probably lost me work in the past. So I'll accept a day or so of incompleteness in hopes that no one is looking right now. I hope I'm right.