Bill MacKenty

Site redesign - not just a blog

I have redesigned my website. I moved it from a simple blog into a portfolio site that offers readers a clearer idea of who I am, and what I do. I’m also finishing my administration and supervision program at Hunter College in June, and I’ll be looking for work as a director of technology - I want this site to be a place prospective employers can learn about me.

Like everything I do online these days, I used my favorite CMS, expression engine. I’ll get into the techncial details later in this post. 

I used a theme from theme forest. At $12.00 I don’t know how I could of done better!

I spent about three days pushing my content into the new design and adding a bunch of pictures and portfolio sections. I added jqueryUI to my site for the accordion - and I might add some other parts as neccesary.

From an EE point of view - my entire site is based in one channel - and I have 24 different categories.  If I assign a post to a category HOWTO it is displayed in the HOWTO section. If I assign an entry to a games in education category, it is displayed in the appropriate place. I can assign one entry to multiple categories.

Of course I use embedded templates, so if I need to update, I only change one page.

My content is absolutely divorced from my design.  All my entries, posts, etc, are stored in a mysql database.  I can pretty much display them anyway I want. As mentioned above, it took three days to move my site from my old design - and this is with 347 entries!!!

I take advantage of EE’s rich feature set. I spend my time writing content and not coding.  I don’t mean for this to sound like an advertisment for expression engine, but when I find something that really works, I want to share it. 

I’ve already gotten some great feedback, and would welcome more.