Well, its done. A pretty dramatic change, but from all the feedback as I was building it, a new design that looks quite alright by most people’s sentiment.

I decided that I was going to post it now, even though I know there is still a fair amount of work to do on it. Its one of those things where no matter how much time you spend on it, you’ll never be completely satisfied with it. Theres always going to be a something more to change or fix or whatever. So I might as well bite the bullet and just get it up and running as quickly as I can, then get the rest of it all sorted as we go.

All the old permalinks are broken. And given theres … a lot of them, I’m not in any major desire to put redirects in place. I have finally got search up and running on this site though. That will be welcomed by quite a few people. Its surprising how many random people coming of search engines use the contact form to ask where the page they’re looking for is. Especially given I always assumed most people left if they couldn’t find what they wanted immediately.

Ironically, search result pages are one of the areas I have yet to finish off. ;-) They work, they’re just really obviously rushed. The yearly and monthly archives pages are another I have yet to sort out as well. Don’t worry… All these are entered as Tasks in my task lists of my phone, and my Google Calendar.

The major change this new design has prompted is that after 4 or 5 years or so since I last used it and even contributed code to the project, I have gone back to using WordPress. Drupal was trialed briefly a few years back, but was overkill for this site. For the last 3 years at least I’ve been using Google’s Blogger. This now means I’m back to running my site using a platform I have to manage, patch, update and keep ahead of. But it also allows me a lot of flexibility. I can even use the WordPress app on my iTouch, or post using an S60 app on my E90. Blogger doesn’t quite offer me that kind of flexibility at the moment I’m afraid.

There are some obvious pages that are still using the old theme. The Contact page for one. Mostly because I have to recode it to work as a page in WordPress before I can use it. This will take a little bit of effort on my part, so I haven’t put any time towards that end yet. Too bad ;-)

What else…. Hmmm…. Can’t really think of anything at the moment. I’m sure theres lot to point out.

What do you think? Now you can see it live in the flesh, do you still like it?