The second stage of resurfacing the site is “finished.” The theme is still based on Sandbox, but I have modified some of the files so far to add some styling content that wasn’t possible with the theme as it was. I had considered adding a second theme layer on top of Sandbox and then utilize a thin CSS-only styling theme on top of that, but it seemed like overkill. My intent was to try to get as much future code updates from Sandbox for free, but if the theme in progress gets wonky, then it will just be time to rework the site again. At this point, the only files that have really changed are style.css, header.php, footer.php, and sidebar.php. The styling is still incomplete. The next step is to finish flushing out and refining the generic styles, as well as flush out some of the other pieces that need styling, such as the Twitter and Flickr feeds. At that point, it will be time to add in a couple of other things as well.
The shame: I realized the other day that the “design” that was current on this site until today had been there for a really long time. Since I have been working on other things and just posting here and there, I had also neglected the fact that there were some massive breakages that just looked really bad, as if something had been attempted and had failed.
The solution: I decided it was finally time to resurface the site, but do so quickly so as to actually get things working again. So, the current state you see here is the result. Not finished, but at least not entirely broken. I did a little research, and decided that I would try out the Sandbox theme. I appreciated what they are trying to do, and I also decided that I should go ahead and start basically from scratch with a foundation that has some nice semantic markup to build on.
The project: What you see here in progress is actually a new theme that I am building on top of Sandbox, tentatively called Plastic Laminate, utilizing pretty much just new CSS on top of the existing Sandbox for now, and then I may actually do some reskinning or plugin building as well, to cover any areas missing content I want. That being said, if things look a bit wonky or like a blog with little design effort applied at the moment, that’s because its still in transition…
I have to say, this is fairly interesting news. Flash was adopted early by many web-shops wanting to give the user an “integrated media experience” that couldn’t be provided by straight html sites. Since then, the tools have been developed to do site analytics of flash web applications, and flash and the flex framework have come a long way toward optimizing development work-flow. Unfortunately, one of the big things that has been missing is search, or rather search recognition; ironically, many Flash sites are really marketing driven advertising sites, yet their content has not historically been searchable through search engines such as Google. A flash site for “Product XYZ” would likely get less of a ranking on search engines than a blog entry discussing XYZ or a flickr image of someone’s dog named “XYZ.” Looks like Google is looking to level that playing field by now making the move to crawl flash sites as well. Should be interesting to see how this effects search, and where this takes advertising and adwords technologies and the like.
