New Decade, New Site

by January 11, 2010

LukeW redesignAs we enter a new decade, LukeW Ideation + Design finally got the redesign it sorely needed. As the saying goes, "the cobbler's children have no shoes" because the last time these pixels got pushed was in 2004. And, as you might guess, the Web was very different back then. To bring things up date I took a week off work, spent late nights in my office, and made several big changes.

So, What's New?

  1. First I combined my blog, Functioning Form, with the rest of the site. When I started blogging in 2003, I didn't know if it would be something I stuck with or something that people liked. 6 years and over 950 articles later, I think it is safe to safe that things worked out. So the blog got folded into the main site.
  2. To help people discover more articles of interest, I added related articles, tags, and previous and next navigation options on every article page I could.
  3. I created a brand new section for the presentation materials I've compiled over the past five years of public speaking. In the old design, you had to jump through multiple blog postings to get your hands on the PDFs, audio, and video for these presentations and workshops. Now they are all in one place with an overview of where they were presented and when.
  4. I also built and added an upcoming events calendar that lists where I'll be speaking in the future.
  5. To make the site more approachable, I simplified both the visual and interaction design of the site while still retaining many of the brand elements from my previous design (colors, logos, fonts, patterns, etc.).
  6. The site also got a bit more up to date with the social Web through one-click links for sharing articles and presentations on Twitter, Facebook, and Digg.
  7. Last but not least, I built a custom back-end and content management system for updating all the presentations and events on the site. Everything now runs on SQL server and should load much, much faster than ever before. In fact, I tuned the back-end so much that I applied the changes to my writings back-end as well.

Of course, no design is ever done and there are a number of mobile, search, and content updates hopefully coming soon. Stay tuned!