The future of this site
/
This started off as a tangent on my resume blog entry but it got so long that I figured it was better to just cut it out of that blog entry and make it it's own.
A big problem I'm having with working on the site is that I think I've lost track of my vision for what this site was supposed to be. I think it includes far too many different elements. I've put up a couple technical articles that I think are pretty good (although I do need to update them to include some diagrams). I have a half-written (at best) section on my travels in Russia. I have a few pages in the personal section. The biggest single area that I've continued to do any amount of work on is the photo section and that work has mostly just consisted of tossing up more photos as I scan them. There's a lot of half-finished work on the site but not much that's actually been completed. The new addition of the blog has been really good because it makes it easy to express thoughts like this that don't really fit into the main structure of the site. But more and more I'm really feeling discouraged by the lack of structure in the rest of the site. It's made it very difficult to complete the re-design because navigation designs that work in one part don't necessarily translate to other parts of the site. Landon suggested that maybe I should treat each individual section as it's own site. I think this will help quite a bit because what I'll end up doing is just having the navigation in each section just relate to that particular section and back to the main page. Yes, it adds 1 extra step for navigating between sections but it helps eliminate 3 and 4 layer navigation structures that would just be way too clunky. Still need to sit down and work through the full design if I go this way.
I think that's another problem I'm having with the site. I did do a little bit of initial planning (far more than any earlier site) but it's still not as well planned as it could have been. So now I'm going back and trying to re-work the existing material into a better plan. Hopefully, if I do it right it will be much easier to work on in the future.
A big problem I'm having with working on the site is that I think I've lost track of my vision for what this site was supposed to be. I think it includes far too many different elements. I've put up a couple technical articles that I think are pretty good (although I do need to update them to include some diagrams). I have a half-written (at best) section on my travels in Russia. I have a few pages in the personal section. The biggest single area that I've continued to do any amount of work on is the photo section and that work has mostly just consisted of tossing up more photos as I scan them. There's a lot of half-finished work on the site but not much that's actually been completed. The new addition of the blog has been really good because it makes it easy to express thoughts like this that don't really fit into the main structure of the site. But more and more I'm really feeling discouraged by the lack of structure in the rest of the site. It's made it very difficult to complete the re-design because navigation designs that work in one part don't necessarily translate to other parts of the site. Landon suggested that maybe I should treat each individual section as it's own site. I think this will help quite a bit because what I'll end up doing is just having the navigation in each section just relate to that particular section and back to the main page. Yes, it adds 1 extra step for navigating between sections but it helps eliminate 3 and 4 layer navigation structures that would just be way too clunky. Still need to sit down and work through the full design if I go this way.
I think that's another problem I'm having with the site. I did do a little bit of initial planning (far more than any earlier site) but it's still not as well planned as it could have been. So now I'm going back and trying to re-work the existing material into a better plan. Hopefully, if I do it right it will be much easier to work on in the future.