Today has been a grueling day, the first of many to come over the next month. I began my foray into the CSS/PHP world on WordPress, with the help of CoPress’ Daniel Bachhuber (who, at the end of this, I’ll be sure to thank a thousand times), in redesigning Central Michigan Life’s Web presentation.
The logo you see in this post is what I have so far as the logo of cm-life.com come Aug. 20. I’m sure some will think it looks bland, and I thought so, too, since it originally was just a five-minute image I put together on Photoshop for the sake of beta testing. But I realized something like this was a perfect way to illustrate what our site will be about: Simplicity.
I’m not looking to shake things up with this design. Yes, there will be a handful of new features, but that’s not what this is about. In the end, it is the content that is going to keep our site thriving, and we have to ask ourselves how we can deliver that content in a simple, yet compelling way. If anything, our site will allow us to accomplish that goal. Worrying too much about the new bells and whistles you can add to a Web site can cause you to lose focus of what is truly important: How your content will look when everything is in action.
After several hours of toying with different styles, colors, backgrounds and layouts, I would say I’ve made decent progress on the new site. But, obviously, there is a lot more to get done. Having a logo and header navigation virtually all set is nice, plus some tweaks with story presentation. But I’d say all that is a small piece of the cake. I will provide more updates, I’m sure, throughout the weekend, since I will have plenty of time to work on the site.
Be sure to give your thoughts on the logo and the idea of simplicity, if you can. I’m sure there’s more to cover in that regard.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at July 30, 2009
cm-life.com Redesign