Launch, Relaunch

Here we go again. A relaunch of the launch of DA. That doesn’t exactly make sense I know. The explanation - my first attempt at going live with Design Adaptations (about two months back) was flawed, at best. I threw up a theme someone else made, posted a half-hearted intro, and sat there drumming my fingers trying to figure out what to do next.

It’s not that I’ve never launched a site before, I just needed to get something up quick so a client could take a look at my portfolio and read through my services. But then what? I wasn’t ready for a real launch, to announce to the world.

First of all I wanted my own design because, well, I’m a designer. Kind of important if I want to be taken seriously, right? Then of course there was the issue of content. I had a lot of drafts, but I couldn’t get past not having my own design in place.

Because I use Wordpress to power this site, I decided to use as my model a theme released by Derek Punsalan, called October Special. I really liked the layout he devised with regard to the presentation of content. So I opened up Photoshop and started playing around. Eventually I came up with a design I could live with. If you’re active in the blogosphere, you might recognize some inpiration by Jeff Croft as well.

Next I started hacking away on the CSS, usually with multiple tabs open to the WP Codex, switching back and forth and learning as I coded. In this way I’ve plodded along for about the last month. Code, test, tweak, read, learn, code, test…

After a while I reached the point where I just couldn’t work on it anymore, and decided I was happy enough to go live. There’s still some gaps that need filled in, hopefully none of which will be too noticeable until the content accumulates and the readership grows. By then it will probably be time for a fresh look anyway. :)

Tags: site | themes