a circular movement of water, counter to a main current, causing a small whirlpool.
By definition the web is a fluid medium, it ebbs and flows like a river. In fact, when I formed my first web development company I pondered a wide variety of names and first settled on Eddy as my company name. Eddy is both a persons name (informal for Edward) and also a circular movement of water, counter to a main current, causing a small whirlpool. Exactly what I wanted my company to do. To be honest, the company was ready to be launched, we had brochures designed, logos ready and then one night at dinner I was speaking to my wife about the launch when my five year old son asked “Do I know Eddy?”.
That stopped me dead in my tracks and made me take a step back. I stayed up late that night looking at the company and realized that I had been too close to the problem, I’d become blind to the obvious and my attention was so focussed on the details that I’d not looked at the larger picture. The old expression “you can’t see the forest for the trees” came to mind but in this case, it wasn’t just about some vague concept it was about money. Eddy died that night but Rodonic was born.
Rodonic web design services, Ottawa
Rodonic was a funny company name, it was intentionally designed to mean nothing. In fact, when Rodonic was launched there was no other uses of the word in the Google database. That was great for branding and helped ensure the company was a success.
Where with Eddy I focussed only on my desires for branding, Rodonic was all about others. The name, selected in part for its vagueness was a perfect software company name. We tested the name to ensure it could work with various titles such as Rodonic WordPress, Rodonic DRAW, etc. and it stacked up as well as Corel, Microsoft or Adobe (I was young and had big dreams). What it lacked however was a passionate team behind it and eventually the business closed.
Why Redesign thisismyurl.com?
Just like Eddy, I was so close to the old design that I’d forgotten to check if the visiting public could find things easily on the website and just like Rodonic sometimes you have to take a deep breath and accept that changes are needed. The top navigation of the old design had bugged me for some time but more importantly, I had to ask myself what the purpose of my website is (remember, that’s one of the ways to make a successful website). This is what I came up with:
- Provide quality, informative posts related to the space between design and technology.
- Provide easy access to downloads.
- Inform the public about my technical and creative skills.
Oddly, my website structure of the old site was too cluttered and confusing for most people to find my most popular WordPress plugins easily. So I took a bit of time and redesigned the layout. Some of the new features of the site are just to show off but others are designed to make using the website much easier to use.
Automatic highlighting of key posts
Key posts are now highlighted
One of the big improvements to the website is for navigation and highlighting of critical posts. Throughout the website downloads are now automatically highlighted in the listings with icons to represent the categories they belong to. So far, I’ve highlighted:
- Free downloads
- WordPress downloads (as well as Plugins and Themes)
- osCommerce downloads
- Macintosh downloads
- Windows downloads
Automated content additions
To further assist users to find key content such as downloads, I’ve added an automated piece of text at the bottom of key articles, designed to help users find other related downloads much faster.
These new additions to each page are found on all pages that share a common category. For example, if a post is included in the Free downloads category, a paragraph and link to free downloads is included on the bottom of each post. The text is automatically applied from a central repository and increased the displayed count as I add downloads to the specific category.
Improved header
By far the biggest addition to the website is a new, cleaner header. The new header is designed to show the key navigation and highlight sub navigation quickly.
I’ve used standard CSS layers to highlight the active page as well as to focus attention on mouseover states. The key advantage over previous designs is that I can now help surfers find downloads and blog posts much faster.
Ongoing changes
There’s a lot more to come over the next few weeks, and as always I would love to hear back from you so if you’re having a problem finding content on my site, confused by navigation or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you. – Chris
There are a few other Technorati Tags generators for WordPress out there but I found most of them overly complicated and fairly difficult to use, often requiring custom fields or complex processes. What this plugin does is takes the native tags from WordPress and generates a list of Technorati tags for your blog.
