This past weekend, I was able to finish up the redesign of The Girl’s web site, and it’s on display over at www.yayaprincess.com. The new design is a radical departure from here previous website, on the front and back ends. The most striking design change to the average reader is the change in layout, as seen below:

She loves her pink, and so we stuck with it, although we did use two different tones, to give primary areas more focus, and secondary areas a softer feel. I think it turned out nicely.

The more advanced among you will be interested in knowing what changes that we made under the hood. The Girl was running an old version of Expression Engine to manager her blog. Expression Engine is a great content management system for bloggers, and some really great designers, such as Veerle Pieters, use it to create and publish beautiful websites. Two problems existed with The Girl’s installation of Expression Engine, however, and those were: a) As I mentioned before, it was a very old version of the software, and b) I don’t know the first thing about Expression Engine and how to write and edit code for it. So the first major change that we made to The Girl’s site was to move it over to my hosting account, after some undesirables had their way with the old site, to be hosted on my server, and the second major change that we made was to install Wordpress. Simple, stable, reliable, free Wordpress. After the installation we picked a template that The Girl could tolerate until the new site was completed, and I got right down to work.

I have to say that I had been bugging the girl for quite a while to let me redesign her page, and so I had worked up a new design in Photoshop that I really liked. I had gotten a few “Oh, that’s nice” comments thrown my way when she would take the time to glance at it, but nothing concrete. And so I knew that I had a design to implement, and with The Girl going off to far away places to work for a week, I knew I had my time to strike.

I quickly began adding plugin after plugin to the Wordpress installation, which I normally don’t do. I will say this for the Wordpress community, it is vast, but it can also be quite unstable. For those that don’t know, Wordpress is an Open Source software. What this means is that it can be developed by anyone. What this actually means, aside from the above, is that anyone can develop anything that they want for Wordpress. Plugins can be great additions to a site, easy to download and install, or they can be utter and complete @#%&!, unsuitable for use. The latter was the case for a couple of different functions that I found plugins for, but eventually everything was up and running smoothly.

I decided to veer from my normal course of action on this project for two reasons. The first, and I suppose foremost, is that the site had to be usable for The Girl. For the most part sites that I’ve designed in the past have been put together to be updated and changed by me, or by someone with the same level of knowledge, or greater, that I have when it comes to coding. In this case it’s different, and I would hope that The Girl would be the first to agree with that statement. She wants to be able to add quotes that she likes to her page, or pictures to her posts, or a page about her, or a page with links to books she’s read, and she wants to be able to do so with a limited, or nonexistant knowledge of HTML or CSS. And honestly, such is not an unreasonable request. So the first reason was to make it easier to use, for her. The second was to make it easier, for me. I’ll be updating my own site very soon (probably as we speak), and one of the things that I wanted to do with my own newest redesign was to make the every day usage of the site easier, so that I am inclined to want to interact with it more. In the past, I’ve always just performed a lot of the most common functions that you see on a blog outside of the blogging software. Why? Because I could. But it’s certainly no less easy to code this way. And it’s no less time consuming. So I’ve come to the conclusion that things ought be done not because they can be done, but rather because they need be done.

With that said, I seem to think the new design of her site is a big improvement for her, regardless of the new look. The site is more functional, it allows for more ease of use, and a broader range of content. That’s what a personal site is really about isn’t it. To express as much as you can, or at least as much as you want to, to other. So that those that know you may follow along with a sly smile of remembrance as a story is told of which they were a part, or so that those that you don’t may begin to, in whichever way you please. Either way, I hope that The Girl enjoys the new palette that she has been given, on which to paint the portrait of her world.

The Girl and I spent the weekend prior to this one painting our bedroom. This is probably not newsworthy in and of itself, except for the fact that it is the last major move-in change that we plan to make, which in turn signals that we are finally completely moved in, sort of.

We’ve spent so much time in the last few months running around wasting time on unimportant aspects of our life, like work, or time with each other, that we hadn’t really had time to focus on the important things in life, like The Girl’s shrine to McDreamy in our guest bedroom, or my season of FIFA on Playstation 2, or what color walls we want to be looking at every night, as we tuck ourselves into bed, and condemn ourselves to eternity in hell for living together before marriage. And what color does one embark upon when trying to live in sin, exactly? Of course, the answer to that question is Chive:

But let’s start at the beginning. The moving process for us was quite a long one. We made the decision to move in together about three months before we actually did move, and that gave us ample time to discuss what we wanted out of a new apartment, as far as what the space needed to provide to us, as well as what we wanted to bring to the space ourselves, to make it a reflection of no longer just her or I, but of us both, as one. Saying such a thing, however, is much easier than doing such a thing.

We eventually decided that we wanted some fairly neutral colors, with some bright splashes, and we had big plans. The first weekend after we moved, we decided to begin painting, before boxes were even unpacked, in the living room. We had decided that we wanted a neutral color in the area we’d be spending so much of our time in, and so we settled on a color aptly named Harvest Brown:

It has to be said at some point, and now seems as good as any. The Girl, and I, well, we love each other very much. We don’t however, always tend to see eye to eye on every little thing. We do though, argue so little, that when we do engage each other, we usually do so awkwardly, or over inane details, since we’re so out of practice. For instance, replacing the toilet paper roll when you use the last few sheets, is often haggled over. Such was the case with our kitchen and dining area. The Girl and I originally clashed on what colors would go where, and the level of effort that the colors we wanted would take. Since it was decided that The Girl would probably be doing most of the painting, I acquiesced to preferences. And we still ended up having to put five coats of Cherry Cobbler on the walls:

We finished off the apartment with a fair dose of kitsch and as many pictures of friends and family as we could fit into the place, focusing on black picture frames and shelving accenting all three major areas of the house.

So far as homes go, both The Girls’ and my online presences are moving as well. What you’re seeing in now is simply temporary housing, and the same can be said for yayaprincess.com. Lot’s of under the hood modifications are happening right now (Right Now! Like, literally, as you read this!), and I’m working on new designs for both as well. But I will say, that the these temporary digs that were chosen to get us through to the new designs were chosen because they bear at least a passing similarity to the permanent counterparts, so if you like what you see, either here or there, let the Girl or I know.

For all those that have been regular visitors of Southbound Home over the past four months or so, you probably think I’m suffering from multiple personalities. The fourth different design for the site in as many months, this iteration of the site might very well be called the ‘What Should Have Been The Last Time’ redesign. I was looking at the site, and thinking about the kinds of things that I wanted to write about in the next few months, and the design that I’d put in place for the CSS Reboot just didn’t seem to fit. I was proud of the work that I’d done on the site, and I thought it looked quite good, but it didn’t serve my purpose well, and it didn’t fit my needs, and, above all, it didn’t give me the chance to make minor modifications as time passed to fit my many mood swings.

This design, I feel, accomplishes everything that I wanted the first time that I redesigned. The site is, so far as I can tell, completely bulletproof, easily modifiable, and, most importantly, more of a reflection of me and who I am. It’s simple, strong, and straight forward. Of course, if you’ve been exploring the site at all, you know that there are still some small changes that I still need to make, some pixels still to be pushed, but I wanted to roll this bad boy out in time for football season.

I haven’t had a lot of time lately to write, and I’ve felt extremely bad about that. I love to write on this site, it provides me with a much needed outlet for thoughts ideas and feelings that may not have a place anywhere else. But web design, and work, and life in general have taken up a lot of my time lately, and, as far as life as I know it now is concerned, I hope that’s always the case. But still, I wanted to write. I wanted to write about football, and how excited I am about the upcoming football season, and about the feeling of renewal that every fall brings. I’ll be heading down to Oxford for the season opener against Memphis on Labor Day weekend, and the girl is coming with me. The idea of exposing her to her very first SEC game, and her very first Ole Miss game to boot, makes me very excited, and the girl is really excited about it too, way more than I thought she might be, even if she can’t find anything to wear.

So for the near future, I’ll continue to put time in on some web design projects that I’ve undertaken, I’ll be working almost non-stop, and I’ll be living my life in the the free moments that I have. But I’ll write. I promise to write. I’ll write about football, and I’ll write about life, and the feeling of renewal that each fall brings, and the girl. I’ll most definitely be writing about the girl.

When I decided that I needed to re-redesign SBH, I did so with the understanding that it wasn’t just new headers or a banner image that needed to be changed, but rather the layout, and probably more importantly, the entire site architecture of Southbound Home, and so I went back to the drawing boards. I suppose I should first explain what I mean when I use the term site architecture. I’m simply referring to the decision of what should or should not be included in the content that is published on SBH, how that content is stored within the content management system (CMS) that is being used (Wordpress, in this case), and where that content falls within the site based on it’s ‘importance (I’m not naive enough to believe that any of the content that is on SBH is truly important based on Webster’s definition, I’m referring rather to it’s importance in relation to the other content on the site)’.

I spent a few days sketching out my new plans, focusing on three key elements:

• Arranging the site so that it was easier to navigate, with less redundancy of information.
• Uncluttering the design, specifically the home page, so that only the most important elements remained above the fold (i.e., within the part of the screen that requires no vertical scrolling to see).
• Simplifying the code used to build the site in the process, removing all tables and building a CSS driven layout.

The elements listed above are so intertwined that it’s virtually impossible to NOT expound on them all at the same time. The layout that I came up with, the one that I like to call Version 4.1, was actually pretty simply created. Looking below, you can see that the layout is separated into four main sections, which I’ve outlined (click the picture to see it full-sized): Read the rest of this entry »

Really, a single screen grab should say it all…

If the above isn’t recognizable to you, allow me to explain. I finally broke down and bought a license for Mint (which I’ve mentioned before), the custom website stat tracker from uber designer Shaun Inman. As you can see by the stats above, I haven’t had the application installed that long, but I’m already very impressed by it’s ease of installation and use, the crisp, clean design, and the versatility of the various application add-ons, called Pepper. So yeah, that’s that. Make sure to hit the site early and often, so I can get my money’s worth out of this thing.