This is the site that I’ve been working towards for years. I mean, it has only been in my notebook for a month or so, but the things that went into the making of this site have taken years to perfect. It mightn’t look like much, but there was a lot that went into it. Here’s just a few of the things that I thought about. My design decisions, if you will.
Usability: I’m fascinated by usability, but LeeNutter.com isn’t the most usable of web sites. Why not? I opted for form over function. This is my web site, and you’ll have to figure out how to get from one post to another without all the idiot proof stickers that I normally include. I took my favourite approach, the minimalists approach. This is related to the following point.
Removing The Unnecessary: No crazy archive list, you can go URL hacking, and the most recent entry is the most relevant anyway. No inferior internal search engine - Google site:leenutter.com term. No categories - use Google. No post titles, if you’re interested in what I have to say you can read the post, not just the headlines. No advertising - I’ll make my money off my other sites. No link lists - if it’s worth sharing, it’s worth writing about. This is related to the following point.
No Comments: I forget who it was, but I once heard someone fairly influential say that if there are no comments then it isn’t a blog. Well, LeeNutter.com isn’t a blog - it is my web site. One of the reasons why I stopped blogging in the first place was because I got sick of comment spam. Eradicating comments deals with that little issue just nicely. If you’d like to comment, you’re more than welcome to email me.
A Sexy Grid: The Internet has gone grid crazy, and I think it’s a move in the right direction. Josef Müller-Brockmann is a god of mine, and I think that if he was still with us, he would be just about ready to crack open a bottle of Moët in celebration! Like most of my sites, LeeNutter.com sits on a nice grid, both horizontally and vertically!
On top of all of that, or probably more appropriately underneath, it’s edited using a custom CMS that I’ve been building for a while, built around a custom PHP framework, using MySQL and Apache, with the help of mod_rewrite! YeeHa!
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I’m always talking about web sites, user experience and web design. If you like my style, you can stalk me on twitter.