It’s on – sort of. Welcome to the beginning of yet another redesign of this web site, only this time it’s more like starting over and rebuilding on a freshly laid foundation.
Anyone really paying attention will wonder how I went from version 6 to version 7.5. Where’s version 7?
Version 7 in all it’s iterations exists all the way up to functioning markup and CSS. I created a series of what I felt were interesting designs but none of them really got to the point of what I really needed to do – which like all sites is deal with content first. So I started stripping down until I had the shell you see now (which as of this writing does indeed still have some minor CSS bugs). The idea was to force a starting over and at some point this really needs to happen with live content. All good sites start on one foot and continue with the other, eventually becoming something one can be proud of. I haven’t built a site like this for many years as a result of lack of time in addition to my spreading everything too thin with unfinished or unrealized content.
The truth is I have more artwork than I have time to present in any medium. I still feel that the web is the ideal place to archive one’s steps in creativity, regardless of the size of your audience. If my family and friends are the only people to visit this site it’s still worth building a cohesive record of the things that I’ve created. So I want rework what is worth keeping and provide a more media-rich showcase around that.
There is a laundry list of upcoming things: a nearly finished album that is dying to be published, many short films and samples of my video work (both commercial and experimental). There is artwork galore, especially collage and my Photoshop-based digital “paintings”. I’m a busy guy and it’s been years since this site really showed that.
So back to the the whole version thing. Version 7.5 is a stripped down variation on what 7.0 was – and I suspect that the old designs will be utilized in some way in the future. One step at a time and all that. I’ve already taken a sharp turn by building in dynamic Flash slideshows via Slideshow Pro Director and from that I’m giving a lot of thought to how multimedia can live in a liquid CSS layout that remains semantic and fully compliant with web standards.
It looks weak now, but the challenge is a creative one. I’ll grow a lot more if I embrace that and work with rather than slap out another version 6 that never fully matures. Time to get back into the fold…