A brand new approach

May 24, 2008 at 4:03 pm

I don't really do new years resolutions. I find that you never write them down and they tend to focus too much on 'not doing' something - all rather negative for me. However, on the eve of 2008 I decided to make one - just for this year - the product of which you are reading and interacting with right this moment. Welcome to my realigned web presence.

As a designer I've naturally had a number of homes on the web over the past few years, but recently I had unintentionally (but ashamedly) neglected it. One of the more poignant factors was that I had subconsciously become a little bit disillusioned with the content I was producing. I found myself writing about stuff that really wasn't that interesting - I was almost putting stuff up there just for the sake of it. The site had definitely lost its purpose.

However, the past 18 months have seen big changes in both my professional and personal life so it seemed a good time to start clean and start writing again. Stuff I was passionate about. Stuff that I was excited about. Relevant content, once more.

I therefore had two options. I could tweak what I already had or rip it all up and start again - I opted for the latter. I wanted this site to be a new approach, a new philosophy, a brand new start.

So what's new?

To initiate this change I firstly decided to change the primary domain from milesdowsett.co.uk to milesdowsett.com. Not a massive change I hear you say, but an important symbolic change in starting afresh.

Secondly, the content management system had to go. I have always been an advocate of MovableType, but I'd got a little tired of having to do new builds every time I published a bit of content and the Spam filter was becoming a pain in the back side. I decided to make the switch to the much revered Expression Engine platform. I contemplated using Nucleus, Text Pattern - amongst others - but I'd heard such great things about Expression Engine that I was genuinely excited about learning it from scratch. It's early days, but I've only got good things to say about it, thus far.

I also create a lot of social content these days and I wanted my new site to acknowledge this. The site now pulls in feeds from Twitter, del.icio.us and also Flickr. I like the live quality it lends to the site. I also plan to expand on these over the coming months by manipulating a whole host of other APIs - so watch this space!

The design has obviously changed completely. This was naturally an important step in the journey. I wanted the new design to be totally typographic in style and challenged myself in terms of allowing myself the use of just one single typeface throughout the entire design of the site. The idea behind this discipline was essentially to make the content the design. I'm not sure if I have achieved this yet but it is something that I'll be striving for as I improve the design over the coming weeks and months.

I've also moved to a brand new hosting company. The site is now hosted by MediaLayer who I can't recommend highly enough! What attracted me to them was their committment to zero overselling on their shared plans which has plagued the web hosting industry for years. MediaLayer also use LiteSpeed web servers which are frighteningly fast compared to the more primitive shared hosting servers you tend to see out there. If you're running any type of CMS or web application that requires speedy response times you could do a lot worse than MediaLayer. Their support - in many respects as important as the hardware - is also first class with a very diligent customer service policy.

Finally the content on the blog will see a dramatic shift in focus. It will mainly revolve around the key topics and issues facing the web today. That's not to say it won't have snippets of personal and off the wall stuff on there as well, but I want the primary focus to be on new and exciting things happening within the industry. What's more, my professional life has seen a dramatic shift in terms of designing the experience of web applications a lot more and I have a deep interest in interaction architecture and the principles and methodologies that sit behind it. I simply want the content to reflect this a lot more.

So what's next?

It is fair to say this is work in progress. I guess it always will be given the nature of the medium. I certainly have some new ideas up my sleeve that I want to roll out in the coming months that I simply haven't had time to implement yet. Am I 100% happy with it? Probably not, but as a designer are you ever happy? There are also naturally a couple of bugs that I need to iron out and I'm sure a few more will come to light too over the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime I plan to post some (hopefully) relevant and (hopefully) insightful content over the coming weeks that will (hopefully) be of use to a few of you out there. If you have any questions, thoughts, or indeed experience any bugs, please don't hesitate to let me know. Otherwise, enjoy!

Filed under:

News

Comments are closed