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The worst client I have ever worked for is myself. A dozen times since I mentioned I was going to do a redesign I’ve gone through the same process: get a brain wave for a site structure and design, spend countless hours dodging other work while I code it into XHTML and CSS, then spend so long looking at the design while I’m doing other things that I get sick of it. This one was the exception.

I actually did the visuals for this iteration over Christmas, based on the white-middle column I used about three versions ago. The single page design and blog post design was easy, but I got completely stumped as to what to do with the homepage. Luckily when I hit another roadblock with another design about 5 days ago, I opened up the html for this version and struck a brainwave. I got it down relatively quickly, which I suppose was a necessary task given the fact that the server was hacked a few weeks ago, which cost me what little ranking and traffic I had.

I’ve been feeling fairly ambitious lately about using some assets and tools I collated through my time at Active Webdezign in my gap year, such as using a grid-based CSS systema slightly different take on the 960 system, some jQuery and the extensive knowledge of WordPress I picked up. This is in fact the first theme for this site I’ve made from scratch, even though I’ve had plenty of practice by now. As for the future of the site, I’ve learnt quite a few things during my first two terms at university, both about the webReading Don’t Make Me Think was a real eye-opener and the world in general, so I’ve got some serious writing to do, as well as a few WordPress plugins to work on. For example, the small message saying ‘This is your first time here’ on the home page will change when you visit this site more than a day from now, and I’m planning on making a system to inform you of any new posts or comments since you’re last visit.

I’ve missed this. Watch this space.