For my main class project I decided to redesign my personal website which is basically a web-based interactive resume. The original design is located at http://lanzatechnology.com/. Since the original website started off mainly as an experimental playground where I tested all the cool new technologies I learned. Its main purpose is not emphasized enough. The main goal is to showcase my skills as a web designer and developer. I also wanted to update and simplify all of the content and give the website a more professional and modern appearance.
I chose WordPress as my primary tool because it is open source, very powerful, and easy to use. Most people think of WordPress as a blogging platform but it is much more, its a fully featured content management system. WordPress recently won the 2010 Open Source CMS award, beating competitors such as Joomla and Drupal. The WordPress administrator is by far the most organized and easiest to use for me. The automatic online updates which occur pretty frequently are a big advantage over my previous software which had to be updated manually. It’s very easy to extend by taking advantage of the huge plugin directory which has over 12,000 free and open source plugins. Since its written in PHP I have the option of creating and customizing the tool myself since I am familiar with writing PHP code.
Customizing the look and feel of the new WordPress website was much easier than I had expected. The hardest part was finding a suitable portfolio theme that I liked. Since there are countless ways to showcase a digital portfolio I had to find the one that I thought made my websites look the best. I used Photoshop to modify the main color to the green and aquamarine gradient that I had developed for my previous website since I wanted to keep the colors consistent. I really like the home page slider which gives a great introduction to each of the websites in my portfolio in an interactive slide show. I believe the new design makes better use of the space provided and looks much more professional than the old one.
One problem I encountered with WordPress is that the relationships between tags, categories, and archival dates don’t always work. This is probably for flexibility but I think it would be better to enforce the referential integrity. I also noticed that it let me create two items with the same name, which can cause even further confusion. Many times I would find myself having to redo the categories and tags because the sidebar or footer widget wasn’t linking properly. There should be some manner of error checking to ensure referential integrity, consistency, and uniqueness.
I also had some problems with moving the website from one location to another. Since I developed it initially on my personal server (http://www.lanzatechnology.com/wp/) and wanted to transfer it to the iSpace server (http://2007.ispace.ci.fsu.edu/~djl05d/wp/) for this project’s requirments. WordPress has a tool for exporting and importing all of the content in the system. This feature only works for basic content and does not save any extra information saved by additional themes or plugin extensions. It would be better if all content could be transferred with this tool, but I understand the reasoning for this since not every installation has the same plugins. The transfer didn’t turn out as well as I expected, I ended up having big problems like I described above with referential integrity and had to redo a lot of content. None of the graphics transferred either so I was forced to recreate my media library. As a result, some of the graphics don’t load properly on the iSpace server.
The main design guideline I applied was simplifying the website for the user. My old website was more complex because I used it to experiment with many different types of website technologies like image galleries and online video players. But those sections of my website only distracted and confused users from the main purpose which is to showcase my websites. Therefore my new design concentrates much more on my portfolio to ensure relevancy and reduce cognitive load for the user. Now it is very apparent that my main skill is developing websites, where before it could have been confusing whether I was a photographer or film maker, even though in my opinion those skills are part of a well rounded website designer.
The development of this website actually started much earlier than this project, I had been researching different designs and tools to redesign my website for a long time before I even took this class. Since I am a professional website designer my portfolio website is the most important website and should be kept up to date at all times. I chose the technologies that are popular and proven to work right now, but I’m sure there will be something better in the next year or two and I will have to change it again.
I think the main building blocks have been laid to allow me to build up the website over time. I have the ability to extend WordPress via software updates, additional plugins, and theme customizations. The content is always an on-going battle to keep updated, but WordPress makes it very easy to update and manage my content. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m very happy with what I’ve done so far. Once this class project is over I will be replacing the old design with the new one.