For those of you that have been following the progression of our website through the years, the one thing you’ve probably noticed is that I get “unhappy” with it roughly every 6 months. Most of the time that stems from the fact that I was never truly happy with the design at the time I created it, but it was “good enough” to stop working on it for a while. What that means is that the site has gone through many different revisions and styles.
The entire time I have had an idea in my head of what the “perfect” website would be. The most important aspect was obviously the aesthetic aspect of the site. I wanted it to be “clean” without succumbing to the trendy “minimalist bootstrap” sites that seem to be all the rage today. I also didn’t want it to feel like a news site, even though that’s mostly what it is used for. The first one I has happy enough with was just a blog role. Once we got into photography though, it didn’t really give me a good interface to put any of our photographic exploits on the site. The other thing I was struggling with was that we were also still actively working on Mint for Two – but I was toying around with the idea of combing that site with the personal one and just having the one site. The blog role didn’t really let me do that though because it didn’t have a good way to delineate between blog posts and recipe posts.
So the next iteration had a static format for the homepage that automatically pulled in the latest posts from the blog. This was a step in the right direction, but I’m not afraid to say that it looked somewhat like a 7th grader made it in 1999. The ugly “wooden” background also grated me the wrong way, and it just wasn’t as clean as I wanted it to be. Having said that – our life also got super busy with the house, so we weren’t really adding to the blog that much, so I mostly didn’t have to look at it. When I finally did, I instantly knew that it needed to be changed again, and I actually tried to go for that minimalist idea and it was so bad that I just left the site unfinished for a month or two. I knew that it still wasn’t where I wanted it to be, but I had no idea how to fix it. And that brings us to today.
As you can see – the site has changed one more (and hopefully last) time. The site finally has the “clean” look that I’ve been longing for, but it also has all of the pieces to let us put everything we want on the site. I still need to finish putting all of our pictures on the family galleries page, and we obviously haven’t put any effort into the recipes section yet, but the structure is there for us to add everything we want. Hopefully life has slowed down enough at this point to allow us to add content to the blog on a regular basis, and that will definitely be a goal of 2016. For now though – I hope everyone likes the new design as much as I do.