I’ve managed my site in a number of different ways in the six-and-a-half years or so that it’s been up and running.

When I first built it in 2003/2004 (with a beautiful, uh, “Chromed” design), it was built in straight (table-based, awful) HTML, using iframes to manage parts of the site that were found on many pages, such as the navigation.

Over the next two years split the website into a folio hosted on my domain and a blog (called Seven Weeks More) which was powered by Blogger.

Eventually I brought the blog and the folio back together, got rid of the 7wm moniker, and rebuilt the site based on Wordpress. Twice, actually, once [like this][4] in late 2007 and again as you see it now in early 2008. There was actually a third design based on Wordpress, but it never went live.

I’ve always used my site as my playground for figuring out new techniques in HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, and the Wordpress templates that power this site are incredibly complex, with a most categories having their own slightly different templates stacked upon a base template that incorporates several plugins to work. This makes any changes to the design very involved, and very time-consuming.

However, I enjoy writing, and part of the reason I moved the site onto Wordpress in the first place (apart from the challenge of figuring out how to work with Wordpress) was that it provided a pretty simple, straightforward, and most of all quick way of being able to write and then publish online content.

I assumed that if I made the process of creating content online as efficient as possible, it would encourage me to write more often. I was wrong. In the past two years, I’ve updated my site just eight times. Clearly, the speed at which I can create new content is not the limiting factor.

That realisation, coupled with an aching desire to redesign and rebuild the site (a lot has changed in the two years since I first designed and built the current template) has resulted in a decision that I’m kind of excited about.

Starting next year, I will be moving away from templated, CMSed management of andrew.harrison.org and will custom-build each post, including maintaining a static home page. This will allow me to “redesign” the site as I see fit, whenever I want without having to go to the trouble of redesigning an entire website around it.

I have a vague plan in mind, but for the most part, it will be an experiment in design based purely on content.

I’m heading overseas in a week, and I hope to write about our journey whilst over there, so until then, I will leave the Wordpress site up and running until I am home.

I plan on backporting (foreporting?) some of the more recent posts into the new “system” to start off with, but will also hopefully be creating new contentto go along with it sooner rather than later.

Until then, though, I’ll be planning how best to move forward with this crazy idea.