Onwards and Upwards

Site changes should roll out pretty quickly now. It is just a matter of collecting the parts together on the linking site.

That might sound strange, so let me explain.

Redesign time

The House of Preston is not one site but several, with common design and purpose - for members of the Preston family to share genealogy details, family records and so on.

When Blogger started Beta Testing for new designs, it was obvious I had to change the design since it had always been the basis for the look and feel.

In any case, the old one - and myself - had been getting messages making the same points :-

• It was not pretty
• There were no family records
• Users couldn't add their own stuff
• Tutorials in blog pages are not very good

It was one of those times when you look at what you have done and realise you have to do it all over again - but do it properly!

Mash-ups and mix-ups

The plan was to use several providers of features on offer out in Internet-land. At first, there weren't many, but along with the Blogger announcement came the real Web 2.0 sites.

The web was changing and we had to change with it!

Much more could be done. I had always been of the opinion that the web lost a lot when Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of a web you could edit as well as read had gone. The reasons why that vision disappeared are complex, but in a nutshell they come down to Netscape adding features to HTML and Microsoft following suit.

I wanted that vision back - and to judge from the comments I had received, so did you!

Thats what Web 2.0 offered - a simple design could be used for many pages and you, the reader, could change what was on it. Sites with a mix of features like this are called "mash-ups" but here I planned to use different sites for more reliability and ease of use - a "mix-up" rather than mash-up. At the time, I was swamped with things to do, but I set up a basic design on Blogger and looked for other services to deal with suggestions from users.

And they all had to work with the same basic design.

Family records

First up was some way to add family records and make sure readers could post to them. It screamed out that it had to be a wiki.

It took a lot of doing to find something I could use without having to run my own server. In the end, I collected a list of wiki services and tried them all out. It came down to two I liked - PBwiki and Wikispaces. Neither could do what I needed, but I could plan how family records should be stored.

Both reached the needed level of personal design at the end of last, start of this year.

Putting it together

With the wiki sites and Blogger's update, it was time to work on the design. Of course, that could change the way the blog and wikis should look, so it had to be right.

Its worth looking at the development, since it could help people building their own sites. There are limits to one blog posting though, so let's leave that to another time.

We have a simple design thats slightly different for different features. Its still based on static pages with links to more capable sites, but is a big step towards what I think the web should be like - and to what I had been asked for. You should be able to recognise where you are from the look and feel of the page.

But since the old version wasn't pretty, I have to ask - is this better?

You'll find a poll to the right. Please vote on what you think - but remember the design is different on parts of the site. You might want to wait until the whole site is updated before voting.

After all, a major objective is your freedom - so it is up to you.

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