New site

November 9th, 2005

I had a little bit of free time (a rarity!), so I decided to use it to spruce up my default website.

Quick history: I own 3 websites. One is our main domain, which hosts our email and some online photo galleries, while the other two host our respective blogs. My plan was to use our main account (i.e., mirandafamily.org) to link to all three. For many months, if you typed

www.mirandafamily.org

in your browser, you got a very boring page with 3 links: one to each of the blogs, and one to the family photos. Bleh.

Being a software developer, I knew I could do much better, but kept putting it off until I knew what I wanted. Yesterday, I finally got a few ideas in my head, and in a span of an hour or so I whipped up the brand new, data-driven landing page on mirandafamily.org. Check it out.

What’s nice with the new page is that the content stays relatively fresh. If we make changes on any one of the 3 sites, the main page there is automatically updated. It was designed with some minimalism in mind, since all of the contect is really located elsewhere. All I really wanted was a page that points the user in the right direction, then gets the hell out of the way.

Ironically, I had considered some really large content management systems to do the job, but in doing this project I realized I only needed a small subset of what they delivered. So it was nice to be able to identify the needs and deliver a solution that didn’t constitute overkill. Since I expect to be delivering software projects as a career in the near future, it’s great to be able to practice like this.

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