the re-design [1]

2009-07-14

The long road to getting it wrong [yet again].
Part the first.

all change

This is the first in what will probably be a few articles about my re-design of this site. I’ll be writing these not because I think that I have anything special or original to say—but because I’m interested in the thought processes of other developers, so perhaps you are too?

the plan

As usual [for me] was not clear from the start … it developed as I worked on the site. To say that this is sub-optimal would be letting me off way too lightly. I did have some ideas:

  1. I wanted the site to be more focused—it should be a resource for my fellow students rather than a scatterdash series of articles about what fascinated me at any particular moment.
  2. I wanted it to be minimal in every sense: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the look. Everything had to be lite.
  3. As always, I wanted an easy-upkeep navigation scheme.

I’ll deal with the second and third items elsewhere. Here I’m going to be discussing the re-factoring rather than re-design as such.

spring cleaning

One of the hardest parts of re-working an existing site is deciding what to keep, what to ditch and what you need to add. And there’s a particular problem when it is your personal site, you are emotionally attached.

what/who is this site about/for?

I’d decided that in one above hadn’t I? Well that was the meta, as it were, I needed to think about the details.

The who was fairly easy to decide—potential or actual OU students.

Having decided the audience I had to think about what would attract them here, and what I wanted to say to them once I’d them in. Again fairly easy, I had a mission statement—to ‘entertain, assist and inform’. Jings

My rather pompous mission statement suggested a site divided into three sections…

My Blogs
A continuation of my current course blogs and the inclusion of a new personal/web blog. This should allow me to keep the course blog on-task and still let me write unconsidered rubbish about computing/maths/my life.
Course Reviews
Not much to change here.
Resources
Herein lay a problem. What, exactly, do I mean by resources? I decided to include it for the present.

Having decided who I was for and what I wanted to do it was time to see what I had.

the card sort

I like this method—it’s flexible and forces you to think about both the pages themselves and the structure of the site.

The basic idea is to write the name and purpose/subject of a page on a card and then to arrange these cards into a logical scheme. This is very like wireframing but you aren’t concerned with the connection between pages, more important is how a group of pages relate to each other.

After much messing around on the floor I came to the conclusion that, although the blogs and course review sections were fine, there were problems with the resources section of the site.

The give-away was that I only had two or three pages of the current site that fitted the bill. [A large disparity between the number of pages in a section of a site is a reason for serious thought.]

I was left with two choices—drop resources or create some pages. Once I could see the options on the end of the fork the decision was easy—resources had to go.

But ‘killing my children’ was harder than I imagined—there were some things that I desperately wanted to keep [they often got me click-throughs in Google searches]. In the end I went with my head rather than my heart.

so why has it taken so long to get this site up?

Partly this was because I needed to re-write/re-factor many, many pages, but mainly it was because the process wasn’t as tidy as I’ve presented it here. There were many stops, detours and hairpins along the road.

This is inevitable and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. In this case I was my own client—it’s always harder to be honest with yourself.