Pardon our dust, as the saying goes.
I’ve got to redesign all my websites. It’s been stressing me out, when I should be calming further down. Con is over, the last book is out, the house is bought and lived-in, I was coming back down from 5+ months of insanity-level anxiety, and bumped into the stress of this on the way back down. Stress because of what I talked about months ago (years ago?), how I haven’t done any serious web development in years and years and the world has moved on and I don’t know how to do a good job, any more.
And I’ve got to get the sites redesigned, now. This is the time. The lull between books (and before spending hours setting up the old style of pages for the new book, just to have to re-do them in the new style in a little while), the short time before Google turns off Checkout (this Fall), the first mental break I’ve had since my last mental breakdown (last Fall); this is the time to do it.
After several days of sitting, staring, sketching, studying, reading through code with glazed-over eyes until I couldn’t take it any more (and either went to lay down and cry, or bootcamped over to Windows to play SimCity), I figured out what I ought to do first. Before trying to re-design modernevil.com using semi-modern web design techniques and philosophies, likely having a half-functional site for several days while I futz about and try to work things out, I’m going to do most of the futzing over here. On my blog. Because it’s just a blog, right? It’s not like it’s my business; it’s just my heart and my soul in my words. If it looks a little funny, or doesn’t quite work the way it should, that’s not out of character, now is it?
Though with any luck, and with my extremely-small-audience, few if any people will even notice anything going wrong as I screw around with things. Wish me luck!
Updated @2AM: That’s about all I can handle, tonight. It’s pretty close to where I wanted to take this site. Minimalist, easy to read, focused on the text, no comments… I’ll have to think awhile longer about modernevil.com, but I think I’m on track, here. The key thing over there is reducing from almost a hundred pages to twenty-five or so; the per-page design, then, must serve first the new information architecture in addition to the simple/minimalist aesthetic you see here.
I’m supposed to be dieting, but I think I’m going to go eat all the cookies and watch Arrested Development (while thinking about non-linear, limited-POV storytelling, which was the whole reason I watched the first 3 seasons this month).
