So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for WordPress (thanks to John) and I now use WordPress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

As you’ve probably noticed, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very tight with my blog releases after posting almost every day for one stretch there.  The truth of the matter is, when I get highly involved in a site redesign, I like to spend all of my time and effort working on that redesign and forgetting about everything else.   I do admit that its tough for me to get into working on a website design in the first place, but once I’m in the process of working, I generally do not like being distracted.

For me, a distraction of any kind, even that 1 second hi to a friend passing by can throw my mind off by a huge amount.  To me, distractions can end up costing me a few hours (sometimes an entire day) to get my thoughts back and continue working on the problem I was focusing on at the time of the distraction.  Sure, this is annoying, but I’ve learned how to slam the door and tell people not to disturb me at all unless the world is on fire when I begin such projects.  Its just the way that I work I suppose.

So, this redesign took me about 4 weeks total and the end result impresses me.  I must thank John (JohnCiacia.com) for his input and criticism.  John in addition is the reason why the banner was shrunk and the colors were introduced.  Typically, I’m a fan of the most boring colors known to man, but John began playing with colors and I liked the effects. John also familiarized me with Adobe Photoshop (I’m not sure if I’d call myself proficient yet, but I’m gaining) and the concept of web 2.0 icons which I used at the top.  John is also the person behind the RSS dude at the top

At first, I had the header and navigation split into sections, but John suggested that I should make it one image and use CSS to display parts of the image on demand.  Thanks to this, I learned the beauty of CSS and I now use a few big images compared to a lot of small images.  This has improved my site load times a lot (especially on high latency satellite connections).  I now use higher quality images because they look nicer with all the colors.  If you are on dialup, I guess you will have to find a faster connection   Before moving on, there is this great image map making website that I found (http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap).  This site makes getting the values for css positioning of link regions trivial and I used them a lot for the header!

After the header and backgrounds were completed in the first week, I was distracted for a few days and headed home from college.  This was fine since I didn’t really know how I wanted to envision FamousPhil at the time and this was my drive to keep looking for good ideas.  At home, I normally watch Fox news, and for some reason, I caught a Mac vs PC commercial, and that is what got me thinking about how to finish the widget / module (window panes for text and stuff) design for my site.  I decided that I would use a Mac IPhone like widget that is black, and the Windows Vista window as my module background.  Believe it or not, I could not find a decent Vista window on Google images, so I installed a copy of Windows Vista (I don’t use it because its so inefficient and buggy) just to take the screenshot of a window.  It worked out nicely too!

I would like to point your attention to the envelope icon in the main banner at the top.  If you click that icon, you will notice a darkening effect of the page, showing a contact module.  This effect took me forever to accomplish with the help of http://dbachrach.c…hboard/.  Unfortunately, this effect also breaks my site’s CSS validation because the darkening effect is not supported yet as a standard.  Hopefully this will change in the future so I can make my site valid CSS in addition to the already valid XHTML standard.

While I’m on the topic of validation, I might as well note that as a web developer geek, I discovered that I write valid XHTML Strict natrually now.  I can remember that a few years ago, I would spend hours trying to fix my mistakes.   Practice and Time are truly the key to producing effecient websites.  As I move forward, I’m beginning to use divs instead of tables for positioning, and I must say, divs are a whole heck of a lot easier to position correctly when supporting Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari with one css file.  I’ve found that the latter two browsers seem to the hardest browsers for me to support since they like to interpret css tags such as position differently than Firefox and IE which seem to guess correctly based on what you are doing.  This is just another reason why I dislike using chrome and safari so much.

I do have  tips for web developers who are looking to integrate wordpress into their site.  WordPress was fairly easy to encode into my site, except for a few problems.  My first problem was that wordpress doesn’t validate with photo galleries.  I hope that the wordpress people fix this in the near future.  Another problem that I’ve found is that sometimes the wordpress theme files are overwritten during an update.  Unfortunately, this happened to me on the old famousphil design which is why it looked sort of crappy for the past month.  I include a main header file that is site wide now and I have backups of the theme folders, so this should fix that problem.  Finally, since I installed wordpress in a sub directory and have redirected every page to this subdirectory, all of my image and php paths have to be root relative.  I now start all of my images/files with a / so it will goto the root directory of the site (famousphil.com) to find  the appropriate files, this was  a huge help in keeping wordpress updated with the rest of the site without having to keep separate image/css folders.

Finally, I have decided to test the waters with advertisements for the next month.  I chose ads that are non-obtrusive and can easily be blocked out.  The search bar is supposed to also earn revenue.  We will have to see what happens as the month progresses.  If I don’t see much more than an additional annoyance, I will likely remove the text ads all together.  I myself use adblock on firefox so I never see my own ads (except the hard coded ones).  Its really sad that google doesn’t let me hard encode ads like pictures into the site.  This way, ad blockers can’t block the ads, and sites will load much faster than relying on an external javascript codebase sitting on a remote server somewhere.  Perhaps the advertising industry will realize that someday

Thats all I have for this topic.  I hope to be blogging much more frequently now that I’m done with FamousPhil’s redesign.  I’d appreciate any comments that you can provide about the readability and general use.