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Why redesign a web site?

There are a variety of reasons why an organization should redesign their web site. Technology is changing continuously and the site that looked smart and fresh last year looks dull and lifeless this year. This web site was originally constructed using an open source CMS called phpwebsite. This was a nice choice a couple of years ago for a magazine style web site but WordPress has caught up and passed it on the technological front. There are many low cost or free CMS systems out there but I think WordPress is leading the pack. Here are some of the reasons that led me to convert this web site to WordPress.

1. WordPress is an open source blog but it is versatile enough to look good using a newspaper/magazine format.
2. WordPress has probably thousands of attractive, standards based templates to choose from. Check out the themes available at themes.wordpress.net. Someone has probably already created a design that you consider attractive. With a minor amount of tweaking you are ready to show off a new look.
3. The WordPress plugin system makes it easy and relatively painless to add new functionality to a web site. Redirecting your feeds to use Feedburner, updating the Google sitemap for your site, or even updating WordPress itself is easy when you use existing plugins. Browse the plugins at wordpress.org/extend/ for some ideas.
4. The WordPress Widget system allows you to change the look of the main page with out changing the template code.
5. WordPress is easy to update. There are several ways to update WordPress but I especially like the convenience provided with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. This is the five minute upgrade.
6. It was faster for me to convert my site over to WordPress than it was to upgrade to the latest version of phpwebsite!

Picking a theme

For several months I have been looking at themes I could use for my web site. Many of my theme ideas came from Smashing Magazine who regularly review and recommend WordPress themes. It was in the post Premium WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay? that I found the theme that I decided on, Premium WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay? that I found the theme that I decided on, Mimbo. The Smashing Magazine article primarily talked about premium themes but I thought the free version was probably adequate for my needs. So I downloaded the theme and installed it on my development server. After playing with it for a day I decided it would work. The color scheme and the fonts look okay but I wanted to tweak a few things.

Tweaks

My first tweak was to modify the header. I like to use photos in the headers so I had to rearrange some items to make everything work.

My second tweak was to split the existing sidebar into widgets. I used a modified version of the execphp plugin four times to recreate the sidebar. The existing execphp plugin did not work correctly until I removed an unnecessary div statement it wrote.

My third tweak was to modify the main index template so that the Lead Story and Features would not appear a second time in the middle column which shows the regular subject areas. This tweak was remarkably simple although the WordPress documentation lead me to believe it would not work. Being an old programmer I tried what I thought was reasonable way for the query to work and it worked. I am expecting that almost all of my articles will fall into one of the subject categories shown in this column. When I write a Lead Story or Features article I want to assign it to the subject category, too.

My final tweak was to change the graphics to use 128×128 icons for the lead story and 64×64 icons for the middle column articles. I found some free aero icons that help make a geeky site look a little less drab.