Every year I go through a cycle of redesign­ing my website, liking the design a lot, grad­u­ally liking it less and less, and then redesign­ing again. This has pretty much been happen­ing since 2001, so I might as well instate it as an annual tradi­tion. I haven’t kept very good records of the old designs, which is a pity, because some of them were really bad and hilar­i­ous. Here is what the home page looked like in 2001:

As you can see, I have gotten over the rounded rectan­gles thing, but I still like gray. 

The 2008 redesign is more of a collec­tion of refine­ments than a real overhaul. The fonts are differ­ent; I decided that Meta was looking too corpo­rate (not that Helvetica isn’t the epitome of corpo­rate, but it can also be a lot of other differ­ent things). The page headings are now in Gotham and Hoefler text (hooray H&FJ!). As soon as I started working with Gotham I began to notice it absolutely every­where, from Obama to Martha Stewart to Banana Republic, so I guess I’m still pretty much a corpo­rate poseur. But it is nonethe­less a great font.

Some more changes have taken place behind the scenes, as I’ve switched from GoLive to Dreamweaver. I don’t like either program; Dreamweaver is finicky (though perhaps in fewer respects than GoLive) but I still think GoLive has a better user inter­face. Dreamweaver feels like a Windows app, with features thrown together in a bunch of palettes (all of which operate in slightly differ­ent ways) without much regard to orga­ni­za­tion or visual hier­ar­chy. The WYSIWYG composit­ing tools are better and more reliable than Golive’s, though, which is really what counts for me since I don’t know how to program.

I will be making more incre­men­tal improve­ments over the summer. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture, which can be magni­fied courtesy of Cabel Sasser’s pretty sweet Fancy­Zoom: