MoniBlog re-launches!

Sunday April 17, 2005 at 4:28 pm | Filed under Site

Congrats to Monique on her new blog design launching!

Just a bit about the work that went into it, if you’ll indulge me for a second. Monique’s been all over the dark brown and light blue color scheme for quite awhile now, and the world is just catching up. Open a catalog to your favorite furniture store these days and you’ll see that color scheme all over the place. Well, it finally found its way into her blog. While the design is what you’ll remember, the infrastructure of the site changed completely. We migrated the site from Movable Type 2.661 to WordPress 1.5 (I have to thank Jon for originally introducing me to WordPress). The patience paid off with WordPress, since 1.5 is a lot more of a complete package than their previous efforts, and finally included a file upload tool that actually worked with 3rd party posting tools (shout out to etco). There’s a ton more changes in 1.5, all of which made me excited about using it. So I figured Monique’s site was a good subject for this. Mine’s due for a change too, but I’m not quite ready for that amount of work yet. We’ll see how her’s does.

Anyway, the layout of her new site was a “frankenstein” of a ton of ideas that she liked in many different blogs that we looked at while designing. It came down liking so many different parts of so many blogs that we had to do things from scratch. The real trick here is that she points out something that she wants for her site, and I have to figure out how to make it happen. There were work-arounds, some dumb luck, and moments where I figured out stuff that I thought I couldn’t do. I’m particuarly proud that I got the design to happen and still kept the ability to switch “themes” intact. Meaning that we can have user-selectable “skins” for the site that make it look dramatically different in layout and design, and not have to change anything but a stylesheet!

Needless to say, her site isn’t 100% complete, I have a few things I need to do still to clean up some of the code, add a few more plug-ins, etc. But It’s quite an improvement!

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No Responses to “MoniBlog re-launches!”

  1. Monique Says:
    April 18th, 2005 at 10:11 am

    Leave it to me…I pick the most expensive or the hardest option, every time!

    Thanks for working so hard to make it the site I wanted. We didn’t need to compromise the design at all for function. I couldn’t have done it without you!

  2. Shana Says:
    April 18th, 2005 at 11:31 am

    You did a great job – it looks amazing. I love the drawing/thumbnail of you two.