Sometimes it’s interesting to look back at the various websites that I’ve built over the years, to compare notes, to see how I’ve improved, and even sometimes just for a little bit of that embarrassing nostalgic cringe…
Even after finishing the rebuild for pumpkin tonight, and my D&D site earlier this summer, I still have a couple of other redesigns that I’d like to tackle this year – maybe I’m just in the mood, or I feel guilty that they’ve gone this long, or even simply that I feel like I’ve finally got the technical know-how to at least somewhat do them justice!
And granted, I owe the vast majority of that success to WordPress – I know that the last two sites turned out as well as they did because in both cases I could take advantage of existing WordPress themes and just modify them to fit my needs. Mind you, we’re still talking more than just moving widgets around – I’m writing php and tweaking images to fit my design, modifying the widths of sidebars, and for the D&D site doing some pretty funky stuff with the loop to get the homepage output that I wanted, but at least to me it’s still a far cry from creating all of my own graphics from scratch, too.
Right now, my design process begins with a sketch of what I’d like the page to look like, then I find a theme (or several) that incorporates as many of the features that I want, and I go from there. It’s nice having the whole WordPress framework to lean back on to organize the actual content, as opposed to having separate files for each and every page like I used to do! Overall, I have a very love-hate relationship with web design because as much as sometimes I’d love to just hand all of this to someone else and say, “You deal with the stupid CSS – I’m gonna go write content!” at the same time design work can be a nice break for me when I’m not feeling as creative from a writer’s perspective and just want to work through a list of website tweaks that I need.
My ultimate short-term goal is to have another three sites redesigned by January-ish – two big ones and one that should be relatively painless, after which I’m hoping to take some time off from design to work on a new book. After that, who knows – maybe I’ll have a new project altogether to focus on, or maybe I’ll be taking another pass at one of these. A web designer’s work never ends…