I made a brief note of it last night in my Twitter feed (People ask me if I ever plan on using Twitter as anything more than a notification tool. I dunno… doubtful. My day-to-day life just isn’t that interesting, and distilling it down to 140 characters doesn’t really seem like it would help things much. Besides – that’s what the comic’s for, right? Meh, who knows – I might start tweeting soon enough. We’ll see.), but I’ve recently begun designing a brand-new website for Real Life.
This website has done well enough, but it’s coming up on five years since the site has had anything resembling a redesign. Is the current site BAD, per se? No, not necessarily. It’s just that it was designed back when a) I had somewhat less graphical chops, and b) I had different content concerns than I do now. It filled its purpose, but over time, “feature creep” began to occur, and now we have a website where the comic is just that picture surrounded by a thousand ads. Things feel “tacked on” to the side without any real purpose, and much of the page just feels hacked together. Not to mention that I did this back before transparent PNGs were the norm, or before I knew of all the crazy awesome things you can do with CSS.
So, bearing ALL that in mind, I’ve begun a redesign of the Real Life website. And I’m doing it more or less publicly – I’ll be saving screenshots of my progress after each day of work and uploading them to a flickr album (there’s already a few up there now) where you can see the progress the design is making, as well as (and this is the important bit) give me your commentary about the design’s progress. I want to make this the best damned page I can, and while my Ego is a force that cannot be stopped, I know that I have many shortcomings. If you see something that should be addressed, let me know.
Remember, of course, that this is all a work in progress, and it’s going to see a large number of revisions before I call it good and start working on the actual CODE. The entire blog area is pretty much ignored at the moment – that’ll be worked on over the next couple of days. I still need to place in the second tower ad (The page has two – one is Project Wonderful, the other is AdsDaq/Google. Against my better judgement, I’m considering removing the 468×60 banner ad entirely. (even though it’s still bringing in revenue – I just feel like four ad spaces on the page is too many.) And I’ve got all sorts of other social networking-type stuff to get placed, but I’ll figure it out eventually. Bear with me.
In the meantime, however, go check the flickr album out, and let me know what you think. Thanks!
