THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

I just wanted to use that title because it matched the totally awesome picture of Maui.

Anyhow, times, they are a-changing! The wedding is over, and our honeymoon was great, but now it's time to get down to business. Bay and I are in the gradual process of finishing up the final stages of putting our place in order. This probably seems weird, given that we moved in May, but shut it up you - planning a wedding is busy, and things got out of hand quickly.

Most of the cleaning and settling involves those last few boxes that take several centuries to unpack, and dealing with the remnants from the wedding. Also, printing pictures from the vacation, determining what to do with odds and ends, and general housekeeping that we haven't been able to get to until now.

We're certainly back into our usual routine, and I'm stoked about squash and on the road to improving past the last point I was at. I'm taking lessons with Tim now and hitting drills with him, and he's been a great guy to work with. Mike has been a great coach to hit with, and his technical approach to teaching is much more in line with the way that my brain is wired, so that's been very good. Look for some squash journals in the coming future.

As Bay has been unpacking the remaining boxes (most of them are things of Bay's to be dealt with), I've been reviewing my project backlog. Normally I have a list of things that I want to get done that I like to work through in my spare time. It's been almost 6 months since I've had the opportunity to do that, and so that aspect of my life has essentially been frozen. For the first time in over half a year last night, I sat down and realized that I didn't have anything immediate I needed to do. My chores were all done, and I just kind of wandered from room to room unsure of what to do next.

So, I started to revisit some of the things that I have had sitting in the back of my mind that haven't been dealt with in a looooong while. One of those top priorities are updating the website.

This website has been good to me. I designed it over four years ago (seems like longer), and it's provided me an outlet much better for spewing my thoughts into than I would have imagined at the onset. The initial layout was inspired partially by my friend Davin's original website. He had a similar layout, before moving towards something much more awesome, and way less "end of the .dot com era"-y.

I don't mind the design - I think it's fairly clean (if not a little boring), and I like all of the banners that I've put together. I've developed some good concepts and branding over the years, and hopefully can continue to use some of that. However, it's time to move on.

As I have evolved, so too must my creative outlets, and although I can look back through the archives and see clearly how I've matured not just as a writer (Yikes - did I really think the word horsecocks was that funny?) but also as a person. However, aside from the writing, very little has happened to the website itself to indicate that progression. So, the requirement is obvious, and now it's a matter of turning that requirement into a set of actions.

I think I talked about doing this back when I moved the site to a new server, but I was biting off way more than I could chew thinking that I'd be able to fit that into the planning required for the wedding and everything else that was going on. I think I had some ideas at the time for items that I would like to implement on the site, but my focus has since shifted.

So, what I want to do is:

• Draft up a new layout for the site

This is the most important part. I've been using two column layout forever, and I would like to at least attempt to come up with a better, or at least different, way of organizing the content.

• Determine a color theme that I want to use for the site

The current site uses a white background, with blue lettering and highlights. That's okay, but it's a bit dull now. It would be nice to try something a little more bold. Davin and Graham are both using black-based backgrounds, which look nice - something along those lines, but still unique, would be nice to try out.

• Come up with a background for the site that works with that color theme

I was talking to Davin today about how to put together some textures to be used as a background. I've fiddled with a lot of what he described in Paintshop Pro (the uglier, more inbred cousin of Photoshop), so that'll be the starting point.

• Figure out a way of archiving the existing site

It'd be nice to retain a reference of what the site used to look like, if only so that I can refer back to it later on if I want to. Also, I'll need to determine if the archives have to be shifted across - my assumption is that, since they are static pages, they will continue to exist with the old layout and design.

So that's it. Sounds easy right? There's a lot of work there, with many sub-tasks, but that's cool, because I'm a project manager, and breaking things down into manageable chunks (manageable from an implementation standpoint, as well as from a mental standpoint) is what I'm good at. Hmm.. It would be nice to be able to then delegate all of that work to someone else once I'm done breaking it down though.

The most immediate step to take is to begin looking at other sites that are out there on the AOL, and see what I like. From those I can draw inspiration and go from there.

Stay tuned!