Redesigning LunarLog.

As of today, Lunarlog has been redesigned and I think it’s a min­i­mal­ist design that I’m finally com­fort­able with — one that won’t be chang­ing in the fore­see­able future. It’s meant to coin­cide with my new cod­ing and rendering/illustration addi­tions to my main web­site, LunarStu­dio. Below, I’ll dis­cuss some of my pre­vi­ous issues that are now resolved, as well as talk­ing about some of the newer and more inter­est­ing features.

There were a few prob­lems with my pre­vi­ous site that I needed to address:

1. Word­Press updates. It seemed as if there was a new WP update every month, and every other time they released a new secu­rity fix, some of the code or design would break. As a result, I would be forced to go hunt down the prob­lem and try to cor­rect it. Any­one that runs a WP site knows what I’m talk­ing about. Proper main­te­nance can be a full-time job in of itself. By try­ing to keep it sim­ple, it’s hope­fully one less thing to worry about.
2. The old design was ugly. It started off on a good note, but my chang­ing things around intro­duced more of a design mess over time. Add to that other real-life oblig­a­tions, and I was find­ing less time to make cor­rec­tions. If the design is sim­ple, one can focus more on the top­ics at-hand than try­ing to be flashy. I spent more time avoid­ing look­ing at the pre­vi­ous site, because each time I vis­ited it, I saw things that needed to be changed. Hope­fully this will lead to more time spent writ­ing now.
3. I think a website’s design needs to reflect a person’s skills to a degree. If you’re going to call your­self a designer, then I think that it’s only right that the design of other things you cre­ate needs to reflect your atten­tion to detail. No one in their right mind is going to hire a messy painter and I think this was the case with the pre­vi­ous design. While I wasn’t “messy” per se, it looked ter­ri­ble to me. Some peo­ple might lack the pro­gram­ming skills and that is a valid excuse, but at that point they should spend the time seek out a design tem­plate, a web­site that cre­ates web­sites (Wix is one ser­vice that comes to mind), or find some­one that knows what they are doing.
4. Sim­plic­ity in design for usabil­ity. A clean design appeals to people’s senses bet­ter. It makes things eas­ier to read, and also tends to load faster. Peo­ple need to find con­tent with­out adding strain.

Here are some of the under­ly­ing changes:

1. Var­i­ous plu­g­ins were removed. They either caused issues over time, or became unnec­es­sary. For exam­ple, the rel=“nofollow” attribute (orig­i­nally intro­duced by Google) is no longer taken into account. Not only does remov­ing some of these extensions/plugins improve speed and per­for­mance, but it can also lead to higher search engine rank­ings now that Google fac­tors web­site load­ing speed into their algorithms.
2. Updated to some HTML5 stan­dards. While HTML5 is still under­go­ing some changes, the markup is meant to bring the var­i­ous meth­ods together, and to make the code eas­ier to read and nav­i­gate for both the search engines and the coders/programmers. I strongly spec­u­late that this results in higher search engine rank­ing. I highly doubt that this web­site val­i­dates (I don’t want to check lol), but that’s pretty much going to be the case with any new lan­guage or markup.
3. A plu­gin for Google +, Twit­ter Fol­low­ers, and Face­book Likes was intro­duced so peo­ple can denote top­ics and arti­cles of inter­est to Social Net­work­ing sites. The search engines are now fac­tor­ing these items of pop­u­lar­ity as an addi­tional method of mea­sur­ing inter­est, use­ful­ness, and relevancy.
4. New fonts are now avail­able for the web ver­sus the tra­di­tional eight or 10 (I for­get.) It’s every web designer’s wildest dream. Here’s a list of over 247 font fam­i­lies from Google! I’m using two of them here.
5. A rel­a­tively new and cutting-edge fea­ture was imple­mented just last month by Google called Google Author­ship. You can insert HTML5 Rich Snip­pets (rel=“author”) into your web­sites, both dynamic (such as blogs) and sta­tic (such as my other web­site LunarStu­dio) that con­nects your web­sites to your Social Net­work­ing pro­file — in par­tic­u­lar Google +. That in of itself isn’t a new con­cept, but what’s really cool about this new fea­ture is that you’ll start to notice people’s pro­file pic­tures right next to search engine results over the next few months. So, let’s say some­one searches for “Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings” in Google and I’m in the Top 10 (the last I checked, LunarStu­dio was #1 out of close to a mil­lion results *wink*), my pro­file pic­ture helps make my web­site become even more notice­able. This in turn should lead to increased busi­ness. The only prob­lem is that these attrib­utes are so new, that there are no extensions/plugins to enable this so it has to be entered by hand. To add to the mess, peo­ple are giv­ing con­flict­ing meth­ods as to how-to imple­ment it. On top of that, Google hasn’t sim­pli­fied the process (although they’re try­ing) and keeps chang­ing things. It’s a guess­ing game as to when the results should take effect. Peo­ple who arrive early to the game might reap the ben­e­fits of higher search engine vis­i­bil­ity, although it shouldn’t fac­tor into higher SERPs at the present time. I’m per­son­ally excited about this because it’s so new, that’s there’s only a small hand­ful of peo­ple writ­ing about this tech­nique presently. It’s fun to fig­ure out new things.

If any­one is inter­ested in some of these meth­ods, please let me know. I’m going to be busy over the next few weeks, but I’ll try to respond to the best of my ability.