Dynamic Creativist Pursuits

Adventures in Web Design

After work­ing for five incred­i­bly long days and pro­duc­ing sev­eral pages of code revi­sions, an updated ver­sion of Creativist Pursuits went live early Monday morn­ing. It is nearly iden­ti­cal to its pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion, but this time it has dynamic content.

Anatomy of a website.

My friend Stacy Wiedmaier was the one who orig­i­nally implanted the idea into my head of turn­ing Creativist Pursuits into one-stop shop for every­thing Aheram. The goal is to cre­ate a sort of web por­tal that fol­lows every­thing I do in the online medium and pub­lishes snip­pets and pre­views of every con­tent pro­duced by me. A sort of supra-MySpace that is more than twice as fun to cre­ate and with an under­ly­ing code that looks as good and clean as its graphics.

Not a Vanity Page

One thing Creativist Pursuits is not is a van­ity site. I believe it offers some­thing more than your usual van­ity page. It is a self-updating web­site that pulls from var­i­ous sites the con­tent gen­er­ated by me. It is not sta­tic and peo­ple can actu­ally find new con­tent every­day, from Twitter updates to newest Flickr uploads to recently pub­lished arti­cles from my blogs. However, it is not my inten­tion to keep the casual vis­i­tor in Creativist Pursuits. My goal is to fun­nel them as quickly as pos­si­ble to my content.

An over­whelm­ing num­ber of vis­i­tors to Creativist Pursuits landed there not because of direct traf­fic, but rather were referred there by exter­nal sites.

1. Most peo­ple do not type the address of my web­site into their address bar from mem­ory in order to access my site. Most are refer­rals. A lot of it from out­side sites like MySpace and Flickr. Some are referred to the web­site by other peo­ple talk­ing about me in blogs or news arti­cles. And a few are referred to my web­site by the Moo cards I hand out. In many of the social net­work­ing pro­files I have, I link to my main website.
2. If they are inter­ested enough, they will usu­ally click the link and land…
3. On Creativist Pursuits. Successful imple­men­ta­tion of the ideas I am putting for­ward in this post will ensure that peo­ple are
4. ..prop­erly fun­neled to my…
5. …con­tent. Whether it be my blog, my about me page, my con­tact infor­ma­tion, my Flickr pho­tographs, or one my many social net­work­ing pro­files, the goal of Creativist Pursuits is to guide peo­ple to those pages.

It is the dig­i­tal mid­dle­man, the online concierge, the traf­fic war­den in a world of Aheram-generated content.

User Interface

If it is takes more than five sec­onds for peo­ple to find what they are look­ing for in this web­site, I have failed. User inter­face does not apply to just iPods and com­put­ers, it also applies to the web­site. One of the chal­lenges I faced was how I can best make sure that the design of the web­site com­ple­ments its func­tion in stream­lin­ing the user expe­ri­ence of the casual vis­i­tor. I made gen­er­ous use of obvi­ous nav­i­ga­tional graph­ics. They are dis­played in a very easy-to-read font, yet remain aes­thet­i­cally con­sis­tent with the design scheme. Also, I made sure that the graph­ics I use worked for me and the web­site. They are not merely there to look pretty, they actu­ally do serve mul­ti­ple impor­tant func­tions. Not only do they pro­vide a pre­view of the con­tent they link to, they also serve to attract the atten­tion of the casual vis­i­tor to the infor­ma­tion that sur­rounds it. The visitor’s eyes are drawn to the dis­tinc­tive graphic that accu­rately rep­re­sents the con­tent the graphic itself links to.

The inter­face of my web­site should not be a hin­drance between my audi­ence and my con­tent. I uti­lized white-space to effec­tively com­part­men­tal­ize each block of infor­ma­tion so that the casual vis­i­tor can eas­ily nav­i­gate and sep­a­rate dif­fer­ent kinds of con­tent from each other.

Social Networking and Feeds

There is a bit more empha­sis now with social net­work­ing in Creativist Pursuits. My Twitter and Flickr, as well as my pro­files in MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are promi­nently linked to in the index page. Joining those are links to var­i­ous RSS feeds of my reg­u­larly updated con­tent. Clicking » SOCIAL NETWORKS will lead the vis­i­tor to an even larger list of social net­works I am a part of.

Dynamic Content and XML Parsing

One of the biggest changes imple­mented in the site is the addi­tion of an XML parser. Using a Magpie deriv­a­tive called Feed2JS, I am able to repub­lish snip­pets of my blog posts in my web­site. Unlike the orig­i­nal Magpie RSS (which was quite unwieldy), Feed2JS was pain­less to install. It parses RSS feeds from FeedBurner and con­verts it to a sim­ple JavaScript code that I am able to include in my website’s source code. It looks clean, it is pain­less to edit, and it just works. The repub­lished feeds joins the Twitter and Flickr badges in pro­vid­ing new con­tent to Creativist Pursuits.

Thinking Ahead

I cre­ated a mock up of what I intend to do if I were to announce an impor­tant event or news like an upcom­ing gallery exhi­bi­tion or some­thing. Of course, it will be tem­po­rary and will most likely go up and remain up from a week prior to the event until the dura­tion of the event. I am debat­ing if there is some way I can auto­mate this to make this as pain­less as pos­si­ble for me. Most likely, just adding the HTML snip­pet is a lot sim­pler and easier.

The Purpose of All of This

The pur­pose of Creativist Pursuits two-fold and quite sim­ple. Create an audi­ence of my work and then facil­i­tate oppor­tu­ni­ties by expos­ing audi­ences to my work. By pro­vid­ing ways to eas­ily con­tact me, friend me on MySpace, drop me a line, fol­low me on Twitter, or view my work while mak­ing it very easy to do so, I am cre­at­ing a base of audi­ence that will appre­ci­ate and enjoy my cre­ativist pursuits.