Site Relaunch

Whew….I’ve been working here for about six hours straight and I finally have this thing taken care of. This was almost like a test to see if I could actually put all the pieces together since I will likely have to do so again for work pretty soon. Below is a snapshot of the new homepage as of 2:41am PST.

I don’t think that launching a new website is really something worthy of being considered a project; but in this case it was a pretty good sprint. I think it looks pretty good (except in IE) for someone who really didn’t know much PHP and had only a basic understanding of how wordpress templates work (this site is using wordpress as a CMS). For me, it was a pretty sizable undertaking. I started with a template that had some jquery functionality built into it. After reformatting my pages to work in the new theme, I started building it out, changing the template files to try to get theme to do what I want. The person who did the base work deserves props for being a great guy (or gal) who was willing to give away their work for free. For that reason alone, they are awesome. That being said there was enough stuff that did not work that I was tempted to go just buy a theme somewhere for a better starting point. However, I like struggling with things until I learn how to make them work, so it was definitely worth the $30 saved. Money+learning experience= win. Even though I did not build this out into a proper theme where some of the new elements that I added like the cu3er slide show can be easily configured; I consider this to be a smashing success on my part.

If I decide to figure out how to make my work into an actual theme and roll it out with due credit and permission from the original author, I will need to learn how to use PHP to generate the XML config file that the cu3ber image rotator uses to store its settings. I am sure that there will be other challenges as well, but when I can wrap my head around that; I will reconsider figuring out how to give away this wordpress theme.

I also think my old website which was built for speed in implementation needed to be updated to take advantage of the amazing visual tools out there today. Compared with the old home page, its like comparing a Gameboy screen to an HDTV. Below is a snapshot of the old page pulled from Google’s cache.

Now that I really think about, maybe it wasn’t so hard after all. It just took a long time. Also: even though cu3er is a little slow, its AWESOME.