It is a tradition around here that I redesign my website every couple of months because I can’t stand whatever insane overly complex design I come up with for more than a week or two. I update the ugly, usually dark, page for a month and then give up. But this time I am trying something different. I stripped down the site to the bare essentials. Also I changed the location of the site as staying with wjkrape.com would have been a bad idea. Having a SEO friendly url isn’t too tricky when you have a unique name. If you can have your firstnamelastname.com do so.
Much of the old content is unavailable, it’ll be fixed as I go, but more importantly I’ll be adding a significant amount of content related to my animated short in development, “Relax.”
I made this simple site to host all my thoughts on my upcoming film(s hopefully.) Not everything I post in the coming weeks will be well written but it will feature some smashing images.
About the site, I decided to make a very simple website from the outset. The theme I created for whitneykrape.com includes only the most essential WordPress theme files. (Within reason that is. One could, in theory, make a WordPress theme from a single index.php.) The idea being that rather than making some crazy tricked out extended theme, that is never finished, I would make a simple theme and build it as I use the site. Anticipating what functionality is necessary in a personal blog is no small task. For the moment I have WordPress setup with just a few custom tricks. Starting with visual…
- On the homepage I made four loops linked to categories. Each one is updated when I add a post to the respective category. Frontcase, for instance, pulls an excerpt from the frontcase category. Each loop only displays an excerpt. In this way I can show a nice big 840px image on the homepage but, in the post, there is a properly sized 630px image.
- I reduced the amount of vertical wasted space by using a fixed horizontal navigation on the left. I have to be smart about what I put in there, so smaller resolutions still see the whole menu, but it leaves more room for images in the main content.
The sidebar will hold more widgets later but for now recent posts and a tag cloud help users find the most recent, most posted content.One note on the recent posts. I adapted a nice piece of code found here wordpress-add-date-to-recent-posts-list. It adds the date to the left whereas the default recent posts widget shows only the title.
- As for plug-ins, Akismet, All-in-One SEO pack, MM Forms, and WP No Category Base are all I’m using for the moment.
That’s about it. I’m looking to add more functionally in the coming weeks so more of the sites content will be directed out to my social networking pages. In addition I’ll be adding more images around the site to break up the text. Check back soon, and often, I’m hoping to have a few new pieces of art up very soon.
Stay tuned.
Whitney Krape
