Design with purpose

I’ve been doing a lot of web design, maintenance, and coding recently. If you had asked me two or three years ago what kind of stuff I’d be doing for work or fun (in this case, lucky for me, they mostly coincide) I would not have guessed correctly.

I’ve always been interested in technology, but until last year my experience making web sites has been essentially limited to basic html tags and Microsoft FrontPage (which is just Word, but for making web pages). One of these days I’m going to put up some images of this site’s history, since it’s pretty interesting. But I digress.

In the past few months, I’ve taught myself a crapload of html, php, server-side shit that I never really thought I’d understand. In the massive process of building and re-building Flicker Gaming until it looked like it does now, I had to dump and upload MySql databases, install and fix various scripts and blog engines, run an e-mail list program, and hack through the CSS necessary to style the site.

I’ve learned a lot. And not all of it is about code.

My next fun little project is going to be helping Ben set up his new site. I’m not going to presume to design it myself since he’s far better at anything concerning visual layout than I am. Hell, he’s better at picking colors than I am, and he’s the one who’s colorblind!

But from throwing various sites together in the past year (and when I think about it, it’s been a slow lesson with jason-preston.com over the past five), there’s one rule of thumb that sticks out in my mind: choose your content before your design.

I’m sure anyone who has spent time doing layout on any sort of publication or anyone who has ever worked professionally in web design could have told me this ages ago. But for me it’s a new idea.

I’ve tried many times to build a site and then fill it up with content. It’s always fun to come up with new site layouts, but it works far better if you get your content first (or at least know what the content will be) before you hack out a frame for it. I spent years designing and re-designing jason-preston.com and then, once I had a whole new network of pages up, I tried to fill it up with anything interesting I could find.

The site that’s worked the best so far? This one. It’s based around the content I put up every day, and the site itslef is designed around the content. I’ll write that down as a good lesson learned.