Rushed but needed
The old bellowing and groaning website was due to a refresh. I’ve been carrying its weight for more than a year now. A difficult task. The back-end was so messed up and complicated that it created a lot of friction to publishing something that made me lose my appetite. But things did not go as planned.
Two weeks ago an unfortunate series of events left me without the website, and corrupted backup files. So, in two weeks I had to finish the design and code everything from scratch. The website is not in its final form, but I had to take it out of the oven earlier. Rebuilding everything from scratch was a better solution than spending several hours to repair something that would have been thrown out soon. The worst news is that the old articles are gone. I’ve managed to save something but I don’t know when I can repost them. I'll consider this a new start.
About the design
Designers face this over and over again: designing for oneself is hard. The main problem is that there will always be scope creep. Other times I would go through several design directions before I would be pleased. This time it was different. Being under a lot of pressure I had to bang out something good and something quick. I am very pleased of the turnout.
It all started with the new branding. "The Bull and the Lion", a modern interpretation of a coat of arms, gives more substance to the name. The bull bellows and the lion groans. The logo was already done for some time and now I had a chance to roll it out. I also wanted to give it a more commercial direction. Since the last redesign, I've been working freelance full time, a place to show my work was needed. The rest of the process was natural. A modern 16 column fluid grid, based on the 960.gs and a secret tool to make it fluid(it will be released in a couple of weeks), was used. I also want to start to minimally art direct some of the posts and I left some of the non-semantic classes active.
The back-end is a Ruby on Rails CMS system build from scratch. Why not a more mainstream solution like Wordpress or even Mephisto? Bloat. I don't want one million features — I want just what I need. Now, knowing the system inside out, it will be easy to evolve, easy to change.
The website is hosted on slicehost on a ubuntu/apache/passenger stack, and deployed with moonshine. I know that this decision will further facilitate the development, by allowing me to quickly code, test and deploy. If you want more information about deploying with moonshine, please read a nice article about it — unfortunately realeased after I figured it all out for myself.
My promise
In the following days I will roll out the rest of the website’s parts. I want to post articles more often(read weekly) and now I hope that having a new platform I have no more excuses.
Hold tight and enjoy the ride!