I redesign my website more than I post on it
Careful! This post is looking a little old and could be inaccurate in many, many ways
Unfortunately my desire to draw pretty pictures far outweighs my desire to write and as such the frequency of posts on this website is pretty poor. And as proof of this I’ve redesigned it less than 1 year since the previous version.
I’ve tried to keep thing pretty minimal and simplified many things about the website. Let me know what you think but here’s some of the stand out changes…
Probably killed the SEO
This version puts the blog front and centre, so much that the whole of the latest post is on the home page. Then you navigate through each post individually rather than through pages of posts. The only exception to this is the search which returns a list of posts.
The problem of doing this is that I bury older pages under lots of links and the homepage and latest post page (which isn’t obviously linked to) are duplicates of one another.
At work I’d advise against such a thing in fear of it screwing with the SEO of the website but I wanted to try this and thought fuck it, why not.
No Comments
I actually wrote a post about how I disliked the trend for removing commenting on blogs. I still stand by that but I really don’t get all that many comments on my blog. Designing comment lists and forms for them to be barely used seemed like a waste of time so I’ve dropped them for now.
Off Canvas Menu
I really liked what David Bushell had done with the Off Canvas Menu technique for responsive websites. I’ve been implementing it in a few places now but for my own site I wanted to use it not just for mobile but the whole website. It helps with the minimal look I wanted as well as allowing a more full navigation with search and social links
Wholly WordPress
In previous versions of my website some sections have been inside WordPress and some outside. This was so I could maintain control of some functionality, mainly forms. But in previous versions I got rid of the contact form and there seemed no reason for the separation any more.
To be honest I’m control freak and not a fan of working with WordPress, I get bored quickly of WordPress themes as it always seems repetitive to me but when it comes to blogging it’s still one of the best.
Internet Explorer
It plain breaks on IE8 and below. I might find time to fix it, I might not. But if I do I’ll only cover IE8 as both IE7 and 6 have such low numbers in my analytics it’s really not worth the time.