I have just been told that livingwithmusic.com has taken 6th place in the pMachine Website Shootout (”personal” category). Thank you very much to the judges, especially those who helped put it there.

To be quite frank, I was a bit surprised, simply because the competition was very strong and I had only entered it on second thought. I thought the pMachine Website Shootout might turn out to be a sure stop for people either using or planning on using EE and I wanted to show them that also with minimal effort one could put out a nice EE site.

I only entered my site on second thought simply because I’m not at all proud of what I accomplished in the design and the coding department. Yes, this site has a few flourishes, but that’s about it. See, I had my sights set on leaving those darn tables behind and I used a jackhammer, two wrenches and a nail gun (for good measure) to get my first tableless design together. As a result, the code looks like noodle soup and the design is, in my eyes, somewhat uneven (and lacking some elements).

Simon Collison of colloylogic.com, who put me in third place, was very nice about it and wrote, somewhat guardedly:

This site uses the EE feature set very sparingly, and isn’t the strongest entry from a web standards viewpoint, yet I find the actual design very pleasing, legible and well organised. If it showed more EE innovation I may have favoured it over Mr. T and Me, but still, there is plenty to enjoy about this minimalist design. The drop shadows on the images are particularly good.

Thanks for putting it mildly.

If you are wondering why I’m so critical, it is simple to explain: I have only taken a step away from table-based design, which I used as my web design technique of choice for years, but I have yet to plant one foot firmly in the standards camp. I find it extremely difficult to grasp some of the concepts in a way so they flow freely from my hand(s), and I have still not found one single site on the Internet that can really help me accomplish what I have in the back of my head, but now, 5 months after the site went live, I’m so much further in reading up on standards, CSS and accessibilty that I feel ready to tackle a new design this year.

As everyone is talking about business plans, I also have one, minus the business. When I set out to put livingwithmusic on the Net, I envisioned a three-step programme for the site.

Step one was a move away from table-based design no matter what. This first step proved very frustrating and a whole lot of designs went out the window, but one day, shortly before the Fall CSS Reboot, I simply decided to let one live and dared to jump.

Step two was then to fill the site with content for one year. In the past the problem had always been that I had had some great designs with very little good content to show for myself. This time around, I did not want to approach a much-needed redesign after having amassed enough content to lead the way.

Step three, if everything goes according to plan, is to roll out a new design on January 1st, 2007. I have had one in the works for a few weeks now. The structural planning is guided by the statistics Mint has been collecting for me and the design will hopefully fall into place when the structural planing is completed. The new design will have to take into consideration that most of my regular readers access my site via feed readers (if at all), that I have three main categories (collecting, storing and displaying), that I have lots (!) of Google traffic, and the many other data I have collected via the various stats programs until I ended up with Mint.

As of today, the whole standards, CSS and whatnot thing is largely beyond my grasp, but when I think about my first site that I rolled out with Rick Ellis’ pMachine, things didn’t look all that great in the tables department either. If it took me some years to perfect that technique, I think I should be as patient with a tableless layout as well. So, off to more reading for me.

Oh, yes, the other shootout entries. I’m not going to discuss them as they were all great and inspiring, but I knew that Veerle was going to win the personal category. That one is just perfect, with an ingenious use of new design, coding and EE techniques and tags. I guess there’s justice in the world after all.

Thanks again to all the judges, especially Simon Collison of collylogic, again, Narayan Nayar of etherfarm.com, who put me in 4th place, Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31three.com and Jason Santa Maria of jasonsantamaria.com, who both put me in 6th place, Emily Chang of ideacodes.com, who put me in 7th place, as well as Molly Holzschlag of molly.com and Cameron Moll of cameronmoll.com, who both let me cross the finishing line in 9th place (*phew*).

Kudos.

Categories: (07) Site
Tags: Expression Engine, livingwithmusic.com, news, pMachine, website