No, I haven’t taken up exotic dance; I realized in all my many site changes and redesigns, the one set of pages that has fallen out of synch is my personal site which, since about 2006, has been “Cheryl’s West Coast Life” with the magazine cover image map to one side.
This is what the “writing” page looked like this morning:
When I started thinking about rebranding my creative & writing image, I knew that the above page would have to go. I thought I would just replace it with something specific to my needs and that the rest of the site could continue in its archaic format. I came to realize though if part of what I was showing off was my ability to create good looking things in the digital world, that my personal page — the anchor of my online life — needed to be responsive (i.e. flexible design that is readable on any device) because we have reached the tipping point: more web hits are coming from mobile than desktop devices.
My automatic response was “fine, I’ll do another WordPress install” but this blog is already in part of the directory and WP doesn’t really play well when you try to nest installs. Shawn suggested Drupal but I do not enjoy managing Drupal installs. He asked me how many pages I was talking about and when I mapped it all out I figured I would need up to ten pages to really cover off what I need to do. He suggested a managing a site using Dreamweaver templates. After I calmed down and figured out what he meant, I realized I knew how to deal with that — I had just forgotten because, as he said, I showed him how to do it nine years ago.
I went searching for responsive templates and found a few that seemed like they’d work; downloaded a couple, then had another panic attack until Shawn explained that they would look “borked” until they were viewed live on the intended platform. I dove in. It was awkward at first but I soon found my stride. Five hours later, I have a new site. It will need some more work on copy and content, and I have to clean up the detritus left in its wake, but here’s what the “writing” page looks like now:
It’s mobile friendly and should be easy to navigate — please let me know if you have any problems with it: cheryl.dewolfe.bc.ca
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I also wanted to archive the old magazine covers because while I was quite attached to them, they had long since passed their prime (in order, covers from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012, all created using FD’s Flickr Toys at bighugelabs.com):
