Hey Ladies & Gents - welcome to RefreshingContent.com the 2.0 edition!

If you've been paying attention over the past 2 weeks you'd have noticed the good old site has been lovingly ripped down and replaced with this shiny new batch of trendy. Each year come spring time the birds and bees awaken to do something (of which I'm still trying to extract) and I rise to redesign this flaming pile once again. This marks the 5th redesign in 4 years. Yep, I have a problem. Meanwhile, the world goes near nearly retarded in their concept of what good design is. Lions with lambs folks, I kid you not.





While I initially was smitten with the concept of using WordPress, after a brief but infuriating lack of control, I switched to a new web design program by the name of RapidWeaver. It gives me the beauty of iTunes style program, while tenderly stroking my inner nerd with custom themes and CSS goodness.

Let's take a look at some of the past designs and see how we're doing in this parade of mediocrity:

November 2003:

My first real website. While this is a fine hour for shitty textures and retro art, it is also the first in of many giant images I would place on the intro page of RefreshingContent. The only reasoning here is that maybe primitive man's only defense was building such Photoshop walls? The world may never know.

Of special note is the early cover of Nothing Left to Lose. It was affectionally referred to as the clown painting until the final color adjustments about 5 hours before I handed over the complete files to the printer.

Interior 2003: I'm pretty sure I was blind in 2003.

Redesign 2004:

I like this one. I took my wierdness and channeled it into something palpable. The right was animated gifs of the characters moving and looked pretty swift. The right nav bar expanded with rollover menus that flowed towards the main image area. But the interior was where I tried to be more "creative". Creativity and user friend-liness never go hand-in-hand.

Interior 2004: All pages were divided into two main halves, with 4 navigation buttons on the right side. The thought here was that by forcing the navigation to similar content I could push people to similar content I thought they'd enjoy. Silly puppy!

Clearly my split personality's are showing up even in navigation. The medication was quickly reinstated.

Fall 2004:

The graphic novel "Nothing Left to Lose" was finally being released October 2004 at SPXPO in Maryland, and I needed to add in PayPal functionality. Why not redesign?!

Notice how I begin to accept that while I'd love to make giant buttons and corral the user through the habitrails of my site, I soon gave up and started to lower the hierarchy on my navigation. The interiors used Dreamweaver templates for the first time and allowed much freer navigation from any page. That said, the moving from one second level immediately to another second level page type was nearly impossible. As I addressed these problems the world took suit with shocking immediacy. (Or the successful companies had been along this hierarchy movement since 1999. Whatever.)

No interiors to show on this one kids. Sorry. But Santa is real, so don't fret.

Redesign Summer 2005:

The new site was great. We were picking up in pages, and traffic, but it was very green. Very especially green. Plus, I was in desperate need of updating the site to show more of the design skills I'd honed on the job. Take interesting photos + plus rainbow palette + a heavy dash of time = A pretentious comic art site that came off as more humorous than interesting. Good times.

Interior 2005: The template wins. I give into the homogeny of the computer. Almost all pages are immediately accessible. Many community options are added to no avail.

The 2006 Why's & How's:

Why the new look? The truth is the pages that accounted for 90% of my traffic needed an update maybe once a month. This meant a good drop in interest and the lack of motivation for me to build out any extra areas.

The design was heavily inspired by the very non-web looking site for the Delicious Monster. I enjoyed their approach but felt it my take could brighten things up. The hodgepodge images are an attempt to show what this site will cover. As much as I'd love to release a comic or two a day I can't. Much of this will be ramblings about things I find exciting, amusing, or entertaining.

This release leads in with the blog style page to show interesting designs, comics, and many other items in a way that is easiest for the reader to acknowledge. And when it best for you, it encourages me to keep sharing.

As much as I love to design and tweak, I can't hand code. My pages were excessively uncompliant and I had no real desire to learn why. As I'd experienced first-hand, these items change too quickly to waste your time with. Thus, a fully compliant xhtml and css editor was brought in to do the dirty work.

The 2.0 push is bringing some communities together much more than ever before. Not only does each page support some sort of community based link, but you can always click any of the links at the bottom of this page to subscribe to the digital tomfoolery.

And now a promise: I, STATE MY NAME, WILL NOT REDESIGN FOR AT LEAST A YEAR. You can sleep with ease folks - RefreshingContent lives again.

Heh, heh, seriously - thanks so much for stopping by. We are still getting all of the old functionality back up, and tweaking things on an hourly basis, so please stay tuned!