My website has some new clothes as of this week, and a little new content. The upgrades (I hope!) were inspired by a need, I thought, for greater ease of use on both ends: yours and mine. Yours, because inter­act­ing with my website should be smooth and plea­sur­able and easy, or at least not annoying; mine, because I plan to make more frequent updates in the near future, and updating the old design was a huge Chore.

I’ve become very inter­ested in the design of inter­faces, and the partic­u­lars of how humans interact with them. Little details have begun to catch my atten­tion more and more. For instance, why do the credit-card readers at Shaw’s say, “Welcome to Shaw’s!” on the screen? The only time I interact with it is when I’m buying my groceries and am about to leave. Plus, they have a human greeter at the door to make me feel welcome when I come in. Why does the machine need to be friendly, anyway? Can’t it just be simple and direct? I wonder who made this design decision. Today, when I was building some new compo­si­tion pages, I was trying to figure out how to provide controls for my imbedded audio clips. Turns out, in GoLive, you have to actually type the word “true” in the box next to the word “controller” in the “attribs” tab. Why not just a simple on/off check box?

My website is the main arena that I can do exper­i­ments having to do with inter­face design, and as such, it’s a labor of love. The new design provides all kinds of new useful (I hope) visual and navi­ga­tional feedback. Links are now more obvious and plen­ti­ful, and color-coded accord­ing to the section of the site; forward/backward buttons provide little text rollovers; page headings are more strongly delin­eated; audio samples, as I mentioned, are imbedded into the page, so you can read about the piece while listen­ing to it; there are now little “click-back” maps at the tops of more deeply-buried pages, to let you know where you are. The struc­ture has changed, slightly, with the contact and head­shots sections now rolled into the biog­ra­phy page instead of their own separate pages.

The entire expe­ri­ence of using the site should be faster, too, because I’ve converted most of what used to be images into nice, CSS-format­ted Helvetica text. This is the main improve­ment on my end of things, cutting down my editing time by about 75%. The overall result is that the website is now more purely typo­graphic; I’ve done away with most of the needless graph­i­cal frippery (no more roundrects!) and replaced it with 3‑point hori­zon­tal lines and styled text. The excep­tion, of course, is the icon bar, which I refined back in May. I think the icons still serve their purpose well.

Oh right, and new content, too: Sorbet finally has its own page, with a record­ing kindly furnished by Jay. Shy and Mighty has some new audio files, too, as well as the one-piano version of How can I live. Also, new links aplenty, and some new upcoming events (stay tuned for more).

As always, don’t hesitate to email me if you encounter any problems/aesthetic conun­drums with the site. Still to be updated: the perfor­mance and espe­cially the visual aids section (that divided circle has been on my website ever since its first incar­na­tion back in 2001).