I created amesnjas.com a few months after Ames and I got married as a way to keep people updated on what we’ve been up to and to post pictures of places we’ve been. It has served us well for over 2 years now, and although I am still happy with the old design, the site wasn’t up to current standards and was cumbersome to maintain.

My goal with the new design was to create something that felt fresh and inviting, but that didn’t look like anything else out there - or anything else I’ve designed before. Inspired by the blooming daffodils in our yard and some of the accent elements in my home office, the new look takes advantage of a carefully planned XHTML/CSS template that combines a texture-rich design with both usability and flexibility.

As a webdeveloper, I often underestimate how difficult it is for most people (my wife in this case) to edit and create html content. Behind the scenes, the site uses the Wordpress personal publishing platform which makes both creating new posts and managing site content much more Amy-friendly. Since our photo gallery is such a crucial part of the site experience, I chose ZenPhoto to manage our pictures. ZenPhoto’s easy-to-use admin interface makes publishing and maintaining the photos on our site a breeze. After plugging in the newly designed template, it only took a little bit of creativity to give it that custom gallery feel.

There are a bunch of other aspects of this redesign that I’d like to talk about here, but I should probably save those for the readers of my personal site. Thank you for stopping by, and please do so more often as amesnjas.com will (hopefully) be updated much more often with a steady stream of fun stories and goofy pictures.