A Meyerweb Makeover

This coming week, I’m going to redesign meyerweb.com — which will be its first redesign in twelve and a half years.

I’m doing this as part of Jen Simmons’ #newwwyear initiative.  As Jen put it:

Ok, here’s the deal. Tweet your personal website plan with the hashtag #newwwyear (thanks @jamiemchale!): 1) When will you start? 2) What will you try to accomplish? 3) When is your deadline? Improve an existing site. Start a new one. Burn one down & start over. It’s up to you.

Many of us feel bad about our personal websites. Me included. We keep meaning to make one, improve what’s there, or burn it down and start over. We are busy. Afraid. Overwhelmed. Well, let’s do it. Maybe over the holidays. Maybe after, in the New Year. #newwwyear

On Friday, I announced my plan:

1. I’ll start Wednesday, December 27th.
2. I’ll redesign http://meyerweb.com  for the first time in a dozen years, and I’ll do it live on the production site.
3. My deadline is Wednesday, January 3rd, so I’ll have a week.

I won’t be redesigning all day every day — I still have paying work to do, after all — but I’ll do my best to put in a couple of hours each weekday.

When say I’ll do it live, I mean I’ll be making all my changes here on the production site, with minimal or no testing beforehand — literally opening the style sheet(s) into BBEdit via Transmit, and saving changes up to the server to see what happens.  Stuff will break, and then I’ll fix it, live in the public eye.  It’s possible I’ll try out new ideas and then junk them before moving on to others.  I’m hoping that accidents spark inspiration, as they often do.

(There will be a local copy of the site in case things go so badly that I need to reset to the starting point.  I’m not completely insane, after all.)

I have a vague plan with all this, which is: realign the site’s appearance to be more inviting, more readable, and more visually engaging.  I do have a few past experiments that I’ll fold in, like using relative times (e.g., “Two months ago”) on posts, but a lot of this will be me doing free-association design.  And hopefully a little markup cleanup and enhancement as well.

I’m sticking with WordPress to drive the blog, given that it contains close to two decades of posts and makes it easy to allow comments, a feature I still value; and my hand-built old-school-standards-punk mostly-static templating system for the rest of the site, which let the site be static(ish) way before static was cool.  (No, I will not consider migrating to other CMSes or template systems: with a week set aside for this, I won’t have the time.)

So, that’s the plan: a week for a meyerweb makeover.  I don’t know if I’ll keep up a running commentary on Twitter while I do, or if I’ll take breaks and blog short entries chronicling my progress, or what.  If someone sets up a #newwwyear Slack team, I’ll probably join in.  If the #newwwyear idea excites you, I hope you’ll join in too!

• A Meyerweb Makeover was published on Saturday, December 23rd, 2017.
• It was assigned to the Design, Projects, and Redesign categories.
• There have been two replies.