Lesson 1: get the right tool for the job

Whatever tool you feel comfortable with is probably the right one for you, so I wouldn’t say that this is a very important lesson, but it’s the first one because it enabled everything that follows. I used Blogger for yonks, ‘coz I thought I only needed something that would take my posts and turn them into a blog, and that’s what it did. Using my own design was possible but cumbersome, which made me put off the redesign for a long time.

When I started building GeekReads using WordPress though, it was like trying new food in a new country – I didn’t know what I was missing out on until I’d experienced it. The self-hosted version of WordPress, which is available as a 1-click install process from most hosting providers, allows you much greater levels of customisation in an interface that is extremely well polished and easy to use. It also has a feature to import posts and comments from Blogger, which made the decision to migrate a complete no-brainer.

For the record, I also had a play around with Drupal while I was trying to build a new site for my father-in-law’s guitar business. I admit, it’s a very powerful Web platform but you almost need a degree to be able to use it.

Lesson 2: pick a template that suits you

The “version 2″ design, featuring the Crosses at Golgotha image, was launched not long after I moved from Adelaide to Sydney, having finally left home to make my own way in the world. The choice of image and the relatively dark palette of the theme may be a clue as to my state of mind at the time.

I like to think of myself as a much more mature person now, with a greater understanding of how the spiritual and intellectual parts of me are integrated, and I wanted that to show through in the visual aspect of the thoughts that I shared with you in this blog.

When I first thought of updating cyberseraphic, I envisaged mucking around with Photoshop and HTML like I’d done since way back when I first coded a Web site, but the technology moved on and I hadn’t; ever since CSS became standard many years ago, people stopped using HTML tables for layouts. Why didn’t I just use a stock template? Because I couldn’t find one that was “me” enough, and what is a blog of not an expression of one’s individuality.

In the end, I sorta got lucky. Smashing Magazine ran a competition on creating typography-based templates, and the results were offered free. The 3rd runner up, Experimental by Rodrigo Galindez, stuck out for me because of its clean design and simple structure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a fully developed WordPress template yet, so I settled for its younger brother, Modern Clix.

The template still has a few niggles, namely in that it doesn’t support the default way in which WordPress handles images and captions, and has limited support for sidebar widgets, but overall I’m happy with it and very much look forward to the finished version of Experimental.

Lesson 3: free hosting sucks

Until recently, cyberseraphic was always hosted on various free servers: f2o, 000webhost, byethost, etc. of which the only one I’d have recommended would be f2o except they’re no longer around.

000webhost did a massive dodgy where they broke peoples’ sites under the guise of “migrating” from old servers to a new ones, a project which they claim to have told everybody about in an e-mail a year ago, but nobody can find any evidence of this. Some people lost a lot of work as a result, but luckily for me I was still using Blogger at the time, so I was able to simply republish my posts from there. Any attempt to fix the problem (including trying to delete my account) resulted in a recommendation to upgrade to their paid hosting services. It’s a really underhanded way of converting customers from free to paid accounts, and I wanted nothing more to do with them.

I moved to Byethost, who have a very slick operation, but the problem with them is that your Web site would sometimes get randomly redirected to another (spam) Web site. No thanks.

So why did I persist with free hosts when everybody knows there’s no free lunch? Because it enabled me to host my own domain (this is important in ways that I don’t really have the time or energy to explain in this post, but if interested leave a comment), which the free Web space from my ISP doesn’t let me do; and the amounts of storage and bandwidth provided by most hosting plans was overkill.

It was through the Whirlpool forums that I discovered the Cove value hosting plans – you can’t really argue with a couple of bucks a month! So now I have the reassurance of knowing that my data is routinely backed up (even more important now that I’m self-hosting with WordPress), and that the service is not likely to disappear unexpectedly tomorrow.

Wow. That was a long post. If you’re still here, thanks for sticking with me. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on doing too many more posts like this, ‘coz I don’t particularly want to turn cyberseraphic into one of those “meta” blogs that blog about blogging. But if you’ve got any questions about my redesign process, drop me a note in the comments.

I’ve been maintaining cyberseraphic for nearly 6 years now – an eternity in Internet years, which are kind of like dog years but at a much higher ratio; long enough that some of my pages attract a slow but steady stream of traffic through search results.

As you do, I once put cyberseraphic into a Google search, and was interested to see a result where somebody on a Spanish blog was asking “¿quién coño es cyberseraphic?” which translates as “who the hell is cyberseraphic?” From what I can gather, the free hosting service I used to use had a DNS problem, and one of the blog’s followers noticed that my site was showing up instead of his. The blogger made some pithy remark about how unfortunate it was that he had to play the part of a Christian fundamentalist for the 2 days that it takes for a DNS change to propagate! This just goes to show that the old “Crosses at Golgotha” image was doing me no favours, and that cyberseraphic was sorely in need of a redesign, one which better reflects who I am.

The first thing I wanted to do was to create a logo, so I sat down and wrote out a bunch of things that I thought describe me (sorry they’re upside down and partially chopped off in the scan), and a few other thoughts on the “concept” of cyberseraphic, then started brainstorming various designs:

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You can see that I was leaning pretty strongly towards the “mouse with halo tail” concept. I was also adamant about having wings in there – I really like wings – so the next set of sketches set out to refine that idea:

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The one in the top-right corner was pretty much the end result. The concept was that the wings would double as motion trails, giving the logo some movement. I then asked a good (and talented) friend of mine to help with the final execution, and gave him the unenviable task of trying to make it not look like a penis. He was also the smart cookie who let me know that the mouse tail doesn’t actually come out of the back of the mouse, but the front :-) He was also kind enough to suggest some typography for the name as well. Maybe it’s the symmetry of the design, but this vertical lock-up works better than the horizontal one:

So that’s the logo. I’ll do a post about the other stuff tomorrow.