This evening, I’m launching the latest set of updates to my website.
This site, in it’s current form is very new, and I’m really experimenting with how different things work, so, I’m going to be making some changes, but making them very slowly!
Firstly, tonight, the first few little changes arrive, these can be summarised as follows;
- New Stylesheet – I’ve spent a while on some new colours, a clearer logo and a some more nice little alterations to the existing CSS, although in the near future, I may decide to go down a different route again
- Simpler Homepage – A number of the widgets on the left are gone! This should make everything a bit simpler to use and a bit easier on the eye. Again, there might need to be more alterations to this, but we’ll see.
- Bookmarking Tools - When I launched the original design, I was very aware of the not very nice strip of 12 little squared with horrible little icons on, some services weren’t listed, and some that were a bit irrelevant were, so I was a bit stuck! I’ve decided to replace this with the new AddThis button, which should hopefully be much more user friendly. It includes bookmark and print buttons, and five more social options, including Delicious and Twitter, and the ‘More’ button, which opens a panel listing other services
In the Pipeline
The next few major plans for the site are;
- Blog Categories and Tags – I’m redeveloping the categories and tags, as sometimes they don’t get used at all, and others, maybe too much. Better, more relevant category pages should hopefully make this a bit more effective. Until then, the ‘Blog’ link is gone from the top, as it feels like a bit of a waste of space hen the same content is on the home page.
- About Me – The ‘About’ section needs lots of work. Hopefully, a few high quality pages of rich information will help sort this out. Now all I need is something to include
- Buzzwords – My own little annoyance now, but I want to start linking from within site content more, as I feel these are often the most useful. I’m looking at writing a wordpress plugin to look at the context of references, and link them automatically. It’s a possibility, and something to experiment with.
- Delicious – I’m hoping to deepen the links to my Delicious link library, which is pretty much all academic stuff at the moment
- Print Stylesheet – I’m adding a printer-friendly CSS file, as I like things printed! There’s no major rush on this one, I’d like to get it right!
- Contact Me – Really basic, the LinkedIn and Facebook links are here to stay for the moment (I’m wondering if they’d be better placed at the top though…), but I feel like a contact form would be good too!
This is an, agile-style, work in progress. I’m going to start working on the next couple of features now, and as soon as one is stable and bug-free (as the new style finally is!), I’ll push it out, and add a note on the blog to say so.
I’d be interested to hear any comments about what works and what doesn’t…
Downloads
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