Much has changed on the Web since I created my first web site in 1995. If only I would have taken screenshots my first site (or any of the hundreds that came after). Oh the days of the simple HTML tags: H1, p, img, br, etc. No Javascript, no CSS, no tables that I remember. Now, over a decade later, there are so many technologies a web developer/designer can use! There are hundreds (thousands?) of sites available that provide a vehicle to get seen by the masses. Could you imagine posting a video as simple as this and getting millions of people to view it before YouTube? Millions of people are leveraging these social sites to get noticed by the masses. While I like the concept, there is no simple way to have a single identity. If I like to share photos on Flikr, videos on YouTube, and bookmarks on Del.icio.us, for example, it’s easiest just to point people to each site. While that may be fine for the accidental consumer of your content, that is not very user-friendly for your loyal fan base. Nor does it give you that single brand identity.
Take our situation…we love sharing daily photos of Bryce, training guides, random writing, photos (other than Bryce), and now video. In the past we had separate web sites that either I developed or were on some shared environment (again the social sites), but this meant we had to send friends and family to multiple web sites which was a huge pain. For several years now I had been looking for the holy grail to this dilemma. I wanted a single web site presence and a single administration tool. This of course led me down the CMS (content management system) path, which generally handle non-blog data better than blog engines like Wordpress, Blogger, MovableType, etc. A blog software comparison; I am not sure why ExpressionEngine (EE) was included in the comparison as it is a CMS solution. Of course there are plenty of good freebies and many commercial products as well. I spent several months reviewing my options and eventually decided to use ExpressionEngine (the paid personal version). It’s beyond the scope of this post to go into all the reasons, but the short answer is: fantastic, fast support and easy to create a your own theme (template).
Anyway, my point is…it has been a long journey, but I think I finally am happy to stay put in my current virtual identity. It will certainly evolve over the upcoming months as I still have plenty to do. If you have any suggestions please let us know…which would be a lot easier if we had a contact page, huh? I guess leaving a comment will have to do for now.
We are still working on adding a bunch more features to our web site, but we accomplished enough over the last few days to release a set of changes to celebrate the new year! Yeah, while you were hooping it up last night we were working on the site, so if you feel sorry for us please send wine.
Most of the work was behind-the-scenes so you, the reader, will never know why in the world so many hours was spent on these tasks. However, for me, the developer, it has given me a foundation and framework to expand on. In other words, I will be able to add new features to the web site faster with less work…which is always good. A short list of new features you will see:
Upcoming features:
We will let you know as we roll out these new features. Plus I am sure we will think of many more cool things to add to our site, but for now I think we have enough to do.
