Switching from Movable Type to Textpattern
I've been talking about redesigning this site for quite some time. No question that it needs to be freshened up visually; but there is a larger goal as well: coherence.
This is largely a personal site, and as such it exhibits the same loosely connected personal journalism that affects many such sites. I believe, however, that there is something to be gained by bringing more order to my periodic posts and the site content as a whole. For example, consider my homepage yesterday, before this entry was posted. Not only does a huge single photo of a ponderous typecasting machine dominate the page, but also you have to scroll for a mile before you find a web related article. Let’s say you happened to search for “overlapping tabs web design” as some poor sucker did recently. If you arrived at the home page, there’s a good chance that you'd never find what you thought you came for and, within seconds, you’d leave without another thought, even though there is an interesting article on the subject of your query further down the dreadful page. As it turns out, thanks to Analytics, I know this particular user muddled through and found the page. But I think I can do better than that.
So I plan to rebuild this website. The main idea is to present web design and letterpress content as separate and distinct areas of the site. A third section, Enthusiasms, covers all my other interests, and upholds the personal notebook aspect of the site. I want the site to feel less like a single-threaded blog, and perhaps more like a magazine or newspaper, with distinct sections. Within each section there will still be a blog-like component, but by virtue of it’s being nestled in a focused section of the site, accompanied by related articles, links and other permanent content, it will be more relevant, meaningful and findable. Oh, and finally, I'd like as much of the site as possible to be content managed and searchable. Yes. Even though I am an experienced designer and web developer and can happily hand code pages, I'd still prefer to create and manage my site content from one interface.
Although I've been using Movable Type for years without any hassle, I decided to look around to see if there is some other platform that would better match my goals. What I found was Textpattern. TXP, as it is often called, is essentially another blog software, but it works on a slightly different paradigm than other blog systems I've seen. Textpattern is a more generalized CMS, which handily accommodates publishing content to multiple sections or pages.
I have no doubt that I could achieve a similar goal with Movable Type or Wordpress (which I used for HelpRobJones), but Textpattern just made a little more sense to me. It appears also to be very flexible despite that fact that it is quite simple and lightweight.
So this will likely be the last post using Movable Type. The new site will reveal itself, probably in a few stages, or, as my former boss, Dick Ritter, used to say—apparently channeling his former teacher Paul Rand— “in the fullness of time”.