I’ve finally finished my redesign! I usually try to redesign my blog towards the start of the year, but it took me a long time to come up with one that I liked. I’m still not completely satisfied with this design, I think, but it’s long overdue and I’ve started to realise that I’m putting off other things because of it, so here it is!

Wordpress vs. Expression Engine

I decided to return to Wordpress after last year’s switch to Expression Engine Core after creating blogs for clients in Wordpress 2.6 and seeing the impressive changes since the previous version. To be fair I was using the somewhat limited Core version of Expression Engine because it was free - I think the paid versions have a lot more flexibility, but I’m a bit of a cheapo and wasn’t willing to pay it. Wordpress’s community, many plugins and built in features woo’d me back in the end, and I’m having a lot of fun messing around with it.

Design

It took me forever to settle on a design - in fact I completed a version and was just about to start coding when I realised I didn’t like it enough to stick with it.

I’ve tried to keep my tree motif (thanks Gary for giving me an idea of how to incorporate it into the design) and characters in there, with a bit less clean and slightly more textured look than the previous design. Three columns dropped down to two, unused bits were removed.

The template was once upon a time based on the default Wordpress theme, but hacked up beyond recognition enough to call it my own, I think.

Portfolio?

In the previous incarnation of ChiGarden I seperated out a ‘professional’ blog and a personal one, and my portfolio lived with the former. This seemed like a good idea at the time, as I’m sure employers and colleagues and other industry professionals didn’t care about my personal ramblings and photos of my friends, and my (non-web) friends would surely not care my latest CSS discovery.

Unfortunately I found that I simply didn’t have a lot to write in my ‘professional’ blog, and since my personal one was sort of hidden in a subdomain no one really saw that either. It wasn’t that I didn’t have opinions or a lot to say on web matters - I’m just not much of a writer and found it hard to find the time to put things into intelligent sounding words, so the site was stagnant for months at a time.

This time I’ve taken another different approach - screw the professional blog, there are plenty of other blogs in this space who cover the topics much better than I could. This is my personal space with occassional geekery, and that will have to just be how it is (until I decide to take yet another approach).

My portfolio however will be separate - that’s coming later.

Plans

I had plans, great plans for this site which as usual have not managed to come to fruition just yet. Rather than having the boring ‘this page is under construction!’ message, I’ve decided to just remove the links from the menu and will come back to them later. Eventually I want to mess around more with character design and have a page of characters, a little shop to sell the things I make and a page of downloads - I’m not sure if anyone will buy or download anything, but the fun of planning and creating is enough for me.

Archives

I’ve been keeping archives from when I first started blogging 5 or so years ago… and I’ve decided that it’s a bad idea to keep them there, partly because I’m slightly embarrassed of what the 18 year old me wrote, and partly because a lot of the old images and such are broken after so many shifts. This newest incarnation of ChiGarden only has archives from this year for now - there doesn’t seem to be anything too embarassing in there!

Quick Stats

• Powered by Wordpress 2.6
• Designed in Photoshop, coded in Dreamweaver
• Wood texture from www.cgtextures.com
• All artwork lovingly designed and illustrated by me
• Took more months than it really should have to be completed…
• Doesn’t quite validate, but almost… (I couldn’t resist using SIFr!)
• Looks decent in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 & 7
• Still cleaning up bits and pieces as I see them - let me know if you see anything I could improve on!

I think I’m just glad that I have my blog live again!