I haven’t had a proper website for two years. No site means no maintenance, no constant need for writing posts just to retain the 5 people who often came to see me write stuff as exciting as pooing earthworms.

Photo on Flickr

However I’ve always felt it was a problem when I did have something to say, and did need to show off some of my work. What’s a web designer who doesn’t even have a decent website or a website at all? None more than average Joe, I say.

I’ve since made three promises (to myself) to get a site up and running again, but have found myself preoccupied with other things, or just simply short of any fantastic ideas. That’s changed, I now have a new site (hooray).

The rebranding

I hated my old url. It was silly, difficult to convey over the phone, was a tad childish, and was difficult to pronounce correctly. That’s why I changed my url from bthreen.com (b-three-n), to bentan.me

Why .me? Simply because .com was taken, and I find all the other domain suffixes to be sub-par.

Although this wasn’t such a simple choice. The main reason why I couldn’t design a site was because I couldn’t find a new online identity. “Ben Tan” is such a poor designer’s name and lacks any class whatsoever. I think it has something to do with the asian-ness of the ‘Tan’. After scrawling a long list of names which all didn’t seem to stick, I settled on something which has stuck with me since birth, Ben Tan.

It’s easy to pronounce, and is very personal.

The redesign

There is never a perfect design. Nothing will survive 100 years (or even 1 year in some cases) and still retrain a modern, and trendy feel. And this is something I have a love-hate relationship with. Designing in one of the most dynamic mediums available to man doesn’t make things any better either.

I am never satisfied with what I do. Even this completed re-design barely resembles what the original blueprints showed.

Intended header design

With the introduction of jQuery and rapid uptake in recent years, I felt it was time to hop on the jQuery boat and start playing around with the powerful library. jQuery allowed me to focus more on usability, which I have in the past looked over. I had to learn jQuery from the ground-up, but with it’s simple to understand syntax and myriad of jQuery articles, nothing was too far from impossible.

As I finished up the site, there was something which I realised I must attend to in the near future: The usage of font on the internet. Georgia and Helvetica are so mundane in comparison to sites which use TypeKit or the @font-face CSS3 function. Like techniques and colours, fonts now add to the personality and definition to the web-canvas.

I am content with what I have so far, but with the rapid evolution of the web, there’s always going to be something I want to be implemented, or some new technique I want to play around with.

And it only takes a quick trip to a website design gallery to make me want to start a-new.

Content Optimisation

Search engine optimisation is often talked of, but how often, and how many websites optimise their content? Improving optimisation cuts down on loading time, and gives visitors more time browsing instead of waiting.

While browsing Smashing magazine, I ran into an article called Website Performance: What To Know and What You Can Do which brought my attention to this overlooked area. With those tips in mind, I went at refining my own site. Without going too much into detail, the things which I focused on were: minifying CSS and .js files, images and file compression, and compiling sprites images for commonly used (background)images.

If you want to see how your site fares, you should try this Firebug add-on by Yahoo, called YSlow.

Oh you, you Internet Explorer, you

I’ve always felt like it was an obligation to provide a readable site for everyone, even people who scarcely use the computer and are still using IE6, or somebody working NZ Inland Revenue visiting my site (who still use some Windows NT computer, still running IE6 – true story).

This time round however I decided not to.

If people visit sites with IE6 and find sites are rendering (somewhat) nicely, then what reason do they have to fix it with an upgrade to something better? In a demographic dominated by people with a strong attachment to the motto “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”, the only option is to ultimately break sites until they fix their browsers.

With one post down, I hope I can keep this site a live with more posts which are either amusing or informative, whatever keeps people coming back for more.