I know, usually you don’t expect me to say much nice about Microsoft. But I use a Windows7 machine because I need it for work, and I’ve actually been favorably impressed with Windows 7. It strikes me as a great leap forward for Windows. It’s generally very usable and the only real complaint I’ve had with it is that forced updates always seem to happen when I have the least time to spare for waiting for them to finish, like a forced restart after a lock-up in the middle of a project on a steep deadline. It’s nearly caught up to the early versions of OSX in the features that I use.

So I was surprised to discover a nice new feature of it today. Well, it’s not new. Obviously it’s always been part of Windows 7. But it was new to me. The file previews will show you the contents of text or code documents, like OSX does in coverflow view. And today I discovered, quite by accident, that the preview’s text is actually selectable so you can copy parts of it out. Very useful.

So kudos to Microsoft for including this functionality. I’m sure I will use it quite a bit now that I know it’s there!

For my overhaul, I decided to take the opposite tack of many designers. Instead of designing a pretty shell and trying to fit my content to it, I’m going to start with the content and then design around it. For the dynamic content (mainly the portfolio and blog) I plan to use some sample content and the existing entries so that when I design around them, I have a good variety of potential content for these areas to account for different sizes, amounts, and media.

There are a number of reasons why this approach makes sense. The main one? Because the content is what you’re here for. Awesome graphics are pretty, but you’re not here to look at the nice images I can create in Photoshop (unless you are, in which case I would like to direct you to my portfolio, which I will link as soon as I have the new url). If the content is not well organized and easily accessible and, most of all, interesting to peruse, you’ll hit the site and bounce in under thirty seconds.

Choosing content-first also gives me the chance to rework what I’m presenting to be couched in semantically correct html. Previous versions of this site were created before browsers had progressed far enough to allow full-on styling, when sliced images and nested divs were the height of design. Now that sites need to be mobile-accessible, this makes serving up a lower-bandwidth version of the site difficult. Every extra character adds to the time it takes to download a page on a phone or tablet, so it behooves me to remove as much of the detritus of designs past as I can manage, so that I can get the content to you faster.

Decided it’s time to do away with the old html and site structure. It’s been a good three years since my last redesign, and even then I didn’t update the code, just gave it a new look.

SO.

If this website looks unfinished or unstyled, that’s because it is. I’m scrapping the old themes and building a new one in html5. The content was stale; it’s also getting a complete overhaul.

I am working on it as you read this, and I plan to discuss each of the steps of the new site as I go. But before I can get to that point, I gotta clean up the old site. To that end I’m going to be deleting very nearly everything on this site, so it’ll be pretty sparse here for the next few days.