Finally, My New Layout

I've been working on my website off and on for a long time, and only now is it in anything close to an acceptable state. When I ditched WordPress and started to write my own content management system, I only considered the difficulty of programming the backend. How hard could it be to slap some HTML together after the programming is done? It turns out that, if you want to do a good job, the answer is really freaking hard.

I started with three goals:

• I wanted the site to look good.
• I didn't want to use canned blog templates.
• I wanted to do all the work myself.

It turns out that I suck at graphic design. Big time. I have no sense of color, shape, or space. Most my mockups were total fiascos and those that weren't just didn't gel. I grew demoralized and set the project aside for months on end as I worked on other things. At one point, I considered compromising Goal #2 and ported a canned template over to my Django system. I found, however, that to do that well, I'd have to alter parts of my backend to enable and remove features that the template author was anticipating. I want to be able to add and remove features from my site freely as ideas and the free time in which the implement them along. I decided to try it from scratch one more time, and I came up with something that, for the most part, works.

What was different about the most recent attempt? For starters, I skipped Photoshop altogether and went straight to HTML and CSS. I just think better in those terms, and I'm much more comfortable with my text editor than I am with fancy graphic design tools. By starting with the HTML first, it enabled me to think about the layout from the perspective of effective information design. I knew what information I wanted on my site, and I knew how to prioritize that information according to its importance. Once that was squared away, the layout and design decisions practically took care of themselves. I know that my new layout isn't a masterpiece by any means, and I certainly don't want to be remembered for it when I die. But it works well enough for my simple needs.

I'm still terrible at graphic design and probably always will be, but I learned one valuable lesson from the process. Graphic design is about communicating a message, and if that message is well organized, the rest is much easier. Occasionally I get frustrated with other programmers who, when things go wrong, just randomly try different things instead of stepping back and thinking clearly about the problem. I didn't realize that, with all that time in Photoshop, I was making the same mistake.

The good news is that, at long last, I'm back in the saddle again and, after tying up the last few loose ends with the site layout, I'll be writing a lot more.