Bog Exploring and Web Design

One of the best things about having a Jeep again is that I can get back to exploring the Pine Barrens. I’ve been reading through “Iron in the Pines” by Arthur Pierce, and in the chapter about Quaker Bridge, he mentions a cranberry bog right along Quaker Bridge Road. I’ve been up and down that road a million times, and I’ve never noticed the bog that he was talking about. A little exploring with USAPhotoMaps and I was able to locate the bog. I won’t retype my trip report here, you can read the post on my forums. Here’s a link to the pictures I took.

The side effect of all of this exploration is that I really want to take NJPineBarrens.com to the next level. In a previous post here I mentioned that every time I redesign the site it ends up being way more trouble than it’s worth, but the reality is that I haven’t been satisfied with the site running Wordpress, I haven’t been satisfied with the design, and I haven’t been satisfied with the presentation of the content.

I’ve decided that I’m going back to Joomla. I want to go with Joomla 1.5 RC3, although maybe by the time I’m ready it will be released in final version. I tried Drupal, more specifically vBDrupal, which is designed to be integrated with vBulletin forums. A lot of people rail on Drupal for being complicated, and for sure it is, but by far the biggest drawback - at least in my opinion - is that it’s delivered to the webmaster too spartan. To build your site, you’re left having to load various plugins to do nearly everything - and a lot of them don’t work 100%. Important items like a WYSIWYG editor for articles are available as plugins, not as part of the core Drupal distribution. TinyMCE, which is what Joomla as well as Wordpress use, is a plugin for Drupal, but has some serious problems with Firefox. (Specifically <b> tags being generated for bold text, instead of <strong>) I’m going back to Joomla because - while Joomla’s content organization and SEO is not on par with Drupal, the core components to publish articles are all there, and I can just integrate Joomla with vBulletin by using the plugin that I paid for at BBPixel.

So, this leads me to the visual design. I’ve been using the current design at NJPB for about two years now. There’s a somewhat fluid center column that is either a max of 1050 pixels, or a minimum of 760 (or thereabouts.) There’s a bit of Javascript that loads in a random image on the top of the screen with the site logo, and a navigation bar below it. My users like the random image, so I’ll figure out some way of including that in the new design, but I really need to clean it up and make it way more interesting.

I found some interesting links tonight - 60 Elegant and Appealing Designs, Current Web Site (ironically enough served in ColdFusion), Liquid Web Design, and Don’t Decorate - Communicate. I’m going to be scouring those over for inspiration. I want to go with a “less-is-more” theme, with lots of easy to find and read content.

I swear, once I get the site looking how I want, I’ll be adding more content to it!