If you are joining us at charlesandjes.com for the first time in a couple of days you are probably noticing that something is just a little bit different, since the site has gone through a complete redesign. I wasn’t happy with a good number of aspects of the old design for quite some time but didn’t really have the motivation to go through a redesign. For starters – this site was built on the Joomla content management system originally. At the time I created this site Joomla was ahead of WordPress and offered some more customization options, but since mintfortwo.com is written on WordPress both Jes and I have come to love everything about it. There were a good number of smaller items that I didn’t like too much: the design was “clunky”, the pictures weren’t showcased very well, it was very cluttered and so all of those frustrations, coupled with the confusion of running two different content management systems finally drove me over the edge this weekend.
The new site is built on WordPress, just like mintfortwo.com, so we will not have a consistent back end to work with across both sites. It was built using a simple and clean theme that is responsive, which means it automatically scales for mobile devices. It showcases the pictures that we take in a more “professional” manner, and opens up the entire WordPress plugin ecosystem to further the site. I had to manually move over all of the old articles and images, but one benefit of doing this now instead of months for now is there was obviously less to move. Overall, for a rainy Sunday afternoon’s worth of work, I am very happy with how it has turned out so far. Jes will tell you that I am never satisfied with these things – and it has already spawned another idea for a third site. Assuming I get those ideas out there I will be sure to post about them here when I do.
Finally, let’s all have one more look at what the old site looked like. Maybe in another year or two we can take a look back at today’s design and see how much farther we’ve come.
