I’ve been designing the new site, hence the fewer updates to iLevel. Right now, after many, many revisions, I’ve come up with a main page design that I’m happy with. It was pretty tough because of the way I want the site laid out, less like a blog, but still run by a blog-like CMS. Samir has been hunting down any and all possible CMS candidates, and all the good ones require MySQL and PHP (which I know nothing about), but the list has been narrowed down to a couple.
I still have to see if my main page design actually works (it’s just a sketch wight now). It is theoretically possible, but will require some work, especially on the CMS’s end. Thankfully, with CSS, I have no fears about the main page being visually possible. If this was a few years ago and I had to do it, the only option would be Flash, which I want to stay as far away from as possible.
Due to the rather extensive overhaul I need to do, the redesign will be at least a month or two away. I’ll still post here to the 1.6 blog, and some of the content here will be making it over to the site version (2.0), but how much is uncertain. I don’t really want to have a lot of semi-good photos on the site; I’ll weed out everything but AAA content.
The 1.7 intermediate redesign has been scrapped; it would have a been substantial amount of work, so I decided I might as well spend that time on a more permanent solution. Also, these banner ads my free host has put in are a bit annoying, and I don’t want to have to design around them. When 2.0 comes up I’ll spring for hosting anyway, and then the only ads will be of my own 🙂
So, this thing you’re surfing will hopefully be the last ‘blog’ I ever have, and I’m quite happy that — 5 year too late — I’m actually working on a site.
Vishal