Change. Its inevitable. It finds its way through everything. Its seems to move faster on the web than anywhere else. Thats said, when working on the web, change is a thing you must constantly be prepared for.
Whats the latest change at Sites by Joe? Well for starters, the design you are looking at now is freshly created. I noticed it was really time to update my own site which had gotten pretty stale and ugly.
Some people like to make things grander (visually) when doing a redesign. I opted to take a step backwards with the visual end of things. (there are only 2 graphics on the site within the design!) and focus more on color, contrast and most importantly, information.
The portfolio received a large overhaul. I wanted to add more information about each site, a larger screen shot, and a few other tidbits to fill it out a little more. As I studied my google stats over the last few months, the portfolio section is clearly where everyone spends their time.
The back end needed some attention as well. I've been using classic ASP and other Microsoft technologies for years now, and have been falling in love with open and free technologies like Apache and PHP over the course of 2006. By the end of 2006, I was strictly building sites using these open technologies and haven't look back. (No offense ASP, it's me, not you)
So here we are. I had to redo my own site and build a whole new back end to drive the portfolio. Another major concern was search engine indexing. My ASP pages used variables in the URLs which are difficult for google and friends to spider. The new system uses strictly search engine friendly urls, so hopefully this will get my site a little higher in the standings.
What do you think of the new site? Let me know.