The Last Person You Find Time to Design For
Posted by Jonathan Melville on Monday, May 18, 2009. Filed under Web Development, General
So, where has this site been for the last two years? The joke amongst designers that “the last person you find time to design for is yourself” isn’t really a joke at all. When there’s client work to be done, personal work gets put on hold.
JonathanMelville.com has been in development for some time now. For anybody who has been keeping track, the fact that a real page comes up when you visit this domain now is a huge leap forward from about the last 2 years where it consisted only of a splash page saying “Coming Soon” (although no animited GIFs of guys with shovels). This certainly wasn’t because I wanted it this way. Almost the last year of my professional life has been consumed by one project, Times-Herald.com.
Times-Herald.com is the new (or should I say ‘newish’, since it is now one year old) online home of The Times-Herald newspaper in Newnan, GA. This project was a major undertaking as the old incarnation of the site was abandoned and it was rebuilt completely from the ground up. The Times-Herald.com project started to come together right about the time I started making plans for this site. Once again, the last person you find time to design for is yourself.
It was just in the last 3 months or so that I began to revisit what I wanted JonathanMelville.com to be. After all, a web developer can only go so long without having his or her own site. The one major factor that I had yet to resolve was choosing how I wanted to handle content management. In all honesty, the CMS decision was partly responsible, along with lack of time, for this site sitting abandoned for so long.
So I was in a situation where I knew I had to have content management, but wasn’t thrilled with any of the options I looked at. Let’s see, you’ve got Drupal; great if your a PHP ninja and know how to hack up themes to get just the look you want. I’m not a PHP ninja. Then there’s WordPress, the most popular open-source CMS. Although you could say it’s a CMS, I feel like it’s best suited for blogging. Blogging’s ok, but I wanted a full-fleged content management system that was flexible enough to let me build my design on top of it. There’s nothing worse that having to sacrifice your design because you can’t make it work with your CMS.
All this leads up to my discovery of ExpressionEngine about a month ago. ExpressionEngine is just brilliant, period. It was exactly what I needed and it’s the CMS powering this site right now. I’ve also started recommending to all new clients that their sites be build on top of ExpressionEngine. What good is a flashy new website that looks great but that you have absolutly no control over and no ability to update yourself? I’m very excited about moving client projects into ExpressionEngine, and I know clients will be just as thrilled at the power they now have over their sites.
Ok, with all that said, now it’s back to work. This site is a constant work in progress so check back often. I’m going to try to be deligent about updating my blog. I’ve got lots of things I’ve been wanting to post, including some MooTools classes. Please feel free to send feedback also. Comments and RSS are next on my to-do list. This is a blog after all, and what’s a blog with comments?