It Lives!
I went ahead and got the new site design live because if I don't do it now that it's good enough I'll keep on trying to perfect it until I get frustrated and drop the project.
The thing is, I've actually sort of enjoyed this little
web project. There is no CMS. While I do use ttree
from the Template Toolkit to generate the site, this isn't like
the typical static site generator that has strong opinions about
the nature of the sort web site it should run. I just wanted
something that kills off the boilerplate and helps some of the
tedious tasks, like generating index pages from commmon catalogs
of pages.
One of my main critiques of Wordpress and most other always-active web content management systems is that they are overkill for the vast majority of web sites. Outside of ecommerces and social media, even something like a major news organization has far fewer site updates than you would think. Most sites are practically static. It's not uncommon to have to spend more time taking care of Wordpress than actually posting content in Wordpress. For me personally, I have a few dozen domains, and outside of a burst of work any time a site is revamped, I tend to post about one update per week across all the sites. In other words, most sites see about one post per year. Is it any wonder most of them are hand-edited HTML?
So, anyways, I took heavy inspiration from CNN.com's designs from the late 90s up until about 2003 and started over at least three times. First, I started with a classic table-based layout, and then I remembered why div float tricks were a big improvement. Then I implemented it using modern grid and flexbox. Apparently all I needed to do was wait for it to actually be implemented in browsers. I soon realized I was repeating myself, and reworked everything to actually make use of that cascading part of cascading style sheets.
Hey man, this design sucks
And yes, I know that by contemporary design standards, this site is ugly. That's the point. Marketing and design have gotten out of hand. At the end of the day, the point of a web site is to share information, not to amplify brand synergy through omnichannel consumer experience architectures. Design itself has become a circle jerk.
Yes, I'm aware that not only is this design not mobile-first. It is not responsive in any way, and the mobile edition will be a really stupid joke should I ever actually implment it. I have, however, atleast made a consideration for mobile users in that I made sure it actually works.
Yes, I'm aware that the section pages aren't there. Working on it.
This site exists for my own amusement. Its target audience is one person... me.