Article / 29th Sep 2012

Redesigned, Once More

As any of you who are familiar with web development will know, it's often your own personal sites (or, if you're an agency, company site) that gets neglected - everything else seems to take higher priority and after all, it works - so why fix it?

Still, the previous iteration of this site's design was starting to noticeably age - how I imagine the sixties concrete tower blocks started to look in the seventies - and so I've put some time, effort and sugar consumption into overhauling it, improving the layout, adding some new sections, and generally making it somewhere nice to post more articles and trip notes.

Notable changes

The most notable change is the new push for header images - including the homepage, which features my current location using the wonderful watercolour maps from Stamen Design.

There's also a new section called Places To See - it's essentially a handy place for me to record my holiday ideas, but will also feature my write-ups of various places as I go to them.

To help with this, I intend to start writing up my trips abroad - I seem to travel far too often these days, and (as with many parts of this site) it'll be nice to have a more record of what I've been doing all these years. It might even encourage me to make good use of my pilot's licence, once I finally get it (at the time of writing, it's only a few more lessons away).

Future tweaks

I'll probably be expanding my post parser (which is based on reStructuredText) so I can add small information callouts in the right-hand column, looking into making the design more responsive, and adding maps into the header background for any Trip Notes I write.

Still, in the short term, the challenge is making myself sit down and write more content. That should be easy, right?