In the past few weeks, I’ve completely overhauled the structure of my site. Before the change, the homepage of this domain was coded by hand in HTML, with a little bit of CSS and PHP thrown in there. The blog was managed by WordPress, but the rest of the site was all done by hand. It was a great opportunity to learn some basics, but in the end, maintaining all of the code, and content by hand was cumbersome and difficult. Adding any new section or feature was a chore, and as a result, I really didn’t add much content to it.

Now, in the new structure, the entire site, from the root, is managed by WordPress. Although WordPress is mainly a blog engine, it does have the ability to fully manage static content pages, and gives me full control over site content, urls, SEO, and extensibility. Now, both the blog, and the rest of the pages are all easily editable and maintainable. Plus all SEO and technical aspects of the site are able to be managed from the common WordPress admin interface, rather than hand coding files like robots.txt, .htaccess and sitemap.xml.

One of the first new things you’ll notice about the site is the addition of a “Projects” content category. These are all static page, dedicated to keeping a running space for ongoing projects, aside from the daily blog posts. The new theme is based on Ian Stewart’s “Duster” theme. I’ve also added a “Colophon” page, as a space to put production notes.

Still on the to-do list:

• Update look and feel of homepage – needs to be stripped down, simplified.
• Fix width of blog index and single post layout – needs to be a little wider, sidebar needs to be more narrow
• Update copy and layout on Connect page, include contact form
• Update copy and layout of About section