Reinspire

Let’s Try This Again

It’s time for a brand new start. It’s hard to believe, but the truth is that I’ve been working on this re-design for well over a year now and I just never got around to actually finishing it. Originally I was going to re-design my old site and keep building upon the custom-made foundation that had been working for me since the beginning, but after seeing both Jason Santa Maria and Derek Featherstone completely start over with brand new sites, the light bulb really went on.

Their approach (archiving the old site and moving it to a new location — complete with Apache redirects to preserve search engine rankings — and then starting completely fresh with a new CMS) really made sense to me, and so it became instantly apparent that it was exactly what I needed to do with my site to bring it back to life.

When Derek re-launched his site, almost every word in the first two paragraphs of his “announcement post” summed up exactly what I was thinking about mine, and why I’m doing things this way instead of re-building what I had. In case you missed his post, here’s what Derek had to say on the re-launch of his site:

It is time to get a fresh start. The old design wasn’t inspiring me, and frankly it was a bit of a pain to administer. Like many bloggers, I cobbled it together with some duct tape and glue, hoping it would stand the test of time and serve as an outlet for my need to write. It has served me well for the past 4 years 3 years, but when it comes right down to it, it was time to put the old design to rest and find something to be excited about again.

There were pieces of the site that I just hated using or working with. Why? Because I was doing things manually, and anytime you do something manually, it becomes tedious and a pain to do. What next? You just end up not doing those tedious things. Like posting. Keeping track of the events that I’m speaking at. Add to that the additional work of managing and responding to comments and that lead to inactivity.

While some of his statements don’t apply to me (and they’re clearly marked), I really couldn’t have said it any better.

One huge plus about starting fresh is that it gave me a chance to rethink which pieces of the site I still wanted to keep, as there were definitely some areas that had been neglected and unappreciated. Some of those sections and pages are gone completely, some have been rethought or renamed, and some of them may reappear at some point in the future. Time will tell.

In launching this site, the most important task for me was to get the blog up and running as soon as possible, and because of that, there are some sections of the main navigation that will point to the old version of my site until I figure out how I want to move that content over to this new version. The Portfolio falls under that category, but I’ve already gotten started on its new format, so it’s just a matter of time.

The old version of reinspire.net has been archived, and hopefully all the redirect magic will work properly to preserve search engine results and all incoming links from other sites. Please do let me know if you run into any oddities though. There are probably some areas of the site that still need some attention (browser testing is on that to-do list) and there’s copy that still needs to be written, but it was time to take the shade off this thing and let it get some sun.

So here it is! I think this is really going to work out well now that there aren’t barriers in the way of me actually using this site the way I intended to (well, other than the occasional spat of writer’s block). Feel free to drop me a line in the comments, I’d love to hear what you think!