The New Site: Breaking it Down

About a year and a half ago, I started to think about all of the things I wanted to do to improve this website. At first, I was just going to keep it in the Textpattern system it had already been in for years and just re-skin the site with some additional features. (This would have been the lazy way to do it.)

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to recreate it in an entirely new system and go through each of the thousands of archived sites to clean it up.

There were several websites in the archive that were no longer working or that were outdated anyway. I also wanted larger screenshots of the websites featured on the site. Back when I launched the site in 2001, internet connection speeds weren’t that great, so I had decided at that time that small screenshots were better for load times. Fast forward several years later and that is not as much of an issue anymore.

I kept going back and forth with this and realized that the only reason that I was having a hard time deciding was because I was not comfortable with committing to the level of work that was involved in creating an entirely new website. If I took that out of the equation, the only thing I wanted to do was to start again from ground zero to make this the best that I could make it.

It didn’t take long to get past that hurdle. I can be a workaholic when it comes to goals I am trying to reach, so I knew that the only answer was to start fresh with the 2011 version of the site and work to make it happen. I decided to set certain blocks of time aside each week during the next year to work on this. One of the things I strongly believe in not getting so lost in your work or a specific goal that you forget about the rest of your life. So I worked one evening each week and a few hours every Sunday for a little over a year, with a few skipped weeks in between for a break – and here it is. This article is the last on my list of things to do.

I thought I would share with you some of the major aspects of my thought process in creating the new site. As a web designer I am always interested to see why certain decisions are made for other site redesigns, so I thought I would share some of my thought process for visitors who would be interested in reading about it.

The CMS Decision: WordPress or Expression Engine

I will go ahead and admit that I am a die-hard fan of Expression Engine, and I have used this very robust CMS since 2006 for other projects I have worked on. There is no doubt in my mind that Expression Engine is one of the best content management systems around – for many different types of websites. I will also admit that I used to have a strong dislike for WordPress. This was mainly due to the news I would hear about how WordPress was not very secure and the fact that the thousands of plugins available were created by anyone and everyone under the sun – reliable or not.

You might be a little shocked at my final decision about which CMS to use. But after you see the pros and cons, you might agree that it was a good decision. (Or maybe I will be writing a blog post in a year about how I should have used the other one. Heh. Only time will tell!)

1. Expression Engine comes with a cost to use the system. WordPress is free.
2. Many of Expression Engine’s good plugins cost money. WordPress plugins are free.
3. The resale value of my site in WordPress might be more since more people are familiar with WordPress then Expression Engine. (I am being realistic about the fact that I might want to sell the site at some point in the future. It’s been around since 2001 and has a PR of 6, so I make sure to keep this in mind with my decisions as well.)
4. WordPress already had the features that I needed for this site built into its core system or available as plugins. Expression Engine did not, which would mean several hours of custom development to create those features.
5. I have had an Expression Enging site broken into, so regardless of whether one system is said to be more secure than another, I believe it can happen to any website at any time. After researching the security of WordPress, I concluded that as long as I update the new versions as soon as they are released, the site should be fairly safe (along with some other precautions I will take). And if the worst were to happen, I would clean up the files, and the site would survive.
6. To address the concern of some WordPress plugin creators as being unreliable, I decided that I will only use a plugin when I have to, and I will make sure that it’s created by a reliable developer who will keep up with updates and be available for support.
7. The programming language and template system of Expression Engine is a little cleaner and easier to use than WordPress, but this wasn’t a big enough reason for me to use EE over WordPress for this particular project.
8. As a freelance web designer, I have found that many people who contact me for websites really want WordPress sites, and it is not easy to change their minds. This is because it is easy for them to use and they are already used to it. I also kept this in mind, since I had only created a couple of other WordPress sites prior to this, and I thought that the best way to get more experience developing WordPress sites was to make one of my websites a WordPress site.

So I decided to give WordPress a shot. There are many well-known sites that also use WordPress and love it, so I knew it couldn’t be all that bad. It was a bit of a learning curve since I had limited experience with WordPress before this, but I learned from bits and pieces of a few free templates and took it from there. I have actually enjoyed working with it and getting all of the things done that I needed for the new site. Of course, this does not change the fact that I am still a huge fan of Expression Engine. I have used EE on several other projects, and I love what it can do.

Layout Enhancements

I was getting tired of looking at the old layout. It was not as functional as I wanted it to be and the screenshots were too small. And there was that ugly Google Adwords area in the sidebar. Although Adwords gave me about $300 per month in extra income, I decided to do away with it completely and take the loss for a more polished site – a designer’s sacrifice for the greater good of design. ;)

You will see in this new design that I increased the screenshots significantly, and I set the site to display 8 designs per page to avoid long-scrolling pages and longer load-times. I also removed the sidebars completely so that more focus is on the designs themselves – exactly where the focus should be.

I also wanted a more minimal look so that more attention is drawn to the featured designs themselves than to the details of the site’s design.

I think a more minimal layout is also easier on the eyes – a cleaner, brighter site for displaying numerous other designs. I also tried to make the site as iPhone and iPad-friendly as I could, which meant keeping the width of the site to a decent size and making sure that the page navigation buttons in the gallery were large enough to navigate with your fingertip. (I plan on eventually making a mobile version of the site, but that is being saved for Phase 2.)

Website Sponsorships and Ad Placements

I realize that there are some website owners and designers out there that are not fond of advertisements on websites. I can certainly see their point of view from a designer’s perspective. But for most website owners, including myself, we like to think that we can get something in return for the hard work we put into our websites. I spend several hours maintaining the site, and I also spend some of my own money to keep it running. If I can get paid by sponsors that I approve to display products or services that I think my visitors might be interested in, then I see this as a good thing. Although it’s only a good thing as long as you don’t let it take over your site. I see many sites that make the mistake of serving way too many advertisements. This causes their site to look cluttered and sloppy, and sometimes it makes the site take much longer to load. It’s just not a good idea if you are going to let it take over your site, but if you can make some extra income in a tasteful way that also has the potential to benefit your visitors, then I think it’s a great idea.

So I said goodbye to Adwords, and I made room for two text ad sponsors at the top of the site and a row of image ads just above the footer that I sell through BuySellAds. I carefully thought this through so that the advertisements would not be too intrusive around the gallery content. I also wanted these sponsorships to be more integrated with the design of the site, so I made sure to give attention to those areas as well so that the advertisers would feel more integrated with the design instead of just dropped into the site somewhere.

Additional Features

Over the years, I took notes from the requests of my visitors, and I made sure to deliver those requests in this redesign. You will now see a site search (which will soon be fine-tuned even more), an RSS feed, a way for visitors to vote on designs, larger screenshots, a blog and a resources page. I really hope that the work involved in this redesign paid off for those visitors – and to all of the visitors of the site. Some of you have been visiting since the early days of the site, and I really appreciate your support. I’m happy to see that you keep coming back. :)

Phase 2 Features

Of course there is a Phase 2. You didn’t think I would get everything done that I wanted done working just a few hours each week for a year, did you? ;)

Some of the things on my list of things to do in the near future are:

1. Populate more sites from the archive.
2. Create more functionality for the ‘Like’ voting feature after more votes have been logged.
3. I have something in store for the Designer listings, but can’t say what it is just yet. ;)
4. Create a mobile version of the site.
5. Add a feature that will allow visitors to scratch and sniff the designs on the screen. (Ok. So maybe not that. I just wanted to add one more to the list so it looked longer.)

Those are just some of the things I have planned, and possiblly even more as time goes on. My goal is to make sure that this site continues to be the best that it can be for the ones who use it the most.