Yes, that is. I decided to turn back and continue writing on this blog. It’s probably a temporary decision and later on this post I’ll explain the main things that brought me to reconsider WordPress. A lot of time has passed since last post and many things happened: for first I got my MA in interaction design six months ago making a thesis on a multi-touch interface for creative software. I didn’t took the decision to delete this blog, mainly because thought that the little documentation about my experiments on interaction design at University of Venice IUAV could turn useful for many people and I wasn’t totally encouraged to destroy all. Yes, I cloned my posts on Blogger and started a new blog for a few months, that was because at that time I was obsessed by layout customization and Blogger seemed the best free platform to do it. I was wrong, at least after thinking carefully to my real needs. Then I opened my personal website, drooling to start my very own portfolio and blog, designed and developed from A to Z. But I didn’t consider that the required development time would have been greater than the available, so I switched for a short-time solution, which although has many strong pointas, now is revealing its weakness and by now there’s no more time to make another switch. Briefly I’ll try to explain all the considerations which brought me to turn back:
- Yes, you can customize a Blogger page and it’s free (contrary to many WordPress themes or extensions which a ), but don’t count to come up with good design after spending a few days studying CSS and the XML of Blogger platform. If your need is to have a fast, easy and clean place where to share your thoughts via text, video, images or merging contents with social networks, WordPress is the right choice. In nearly two years I’ve assisted to a huge improvement of its interface, insted of Blogger which still works with the old one.
- The platform I choose for my portfolio is Indexhibit, a popular cms bewteen art and design students, very powerful, easy, fast and obviously free. Probably you can’t find any better web platform if your need is to make a minimal designed portfolio in one day. It’s a bit hard to customize (requires knowledge of CSS and HTML) but there’s a good and fervent community suporting it, so you won’t have problems if you get stucked. If you’have just graduated and you want to augment you visibility through the job market, I suggest it. But, there’s a big problem if you want to run a blog: there’s only a simple news plugin with very limitated functions. Better switch to more reliable platforms such as WordPress, Typolight, Joomla, or Drupal; also, the last three, have very powerful tools to merge content from social networks.
- I really have little time to spend studying web platforms lately, but a huge need to spread my discoverings and thougths about the wonderful world of interaction design. So I keep on going with what I started here, the first place where for first i put all my serious stuff. Probably when I’ll have more time to dedicate to PHP I’ll redevelop my website from scratch, and taht’s not totally deicded. Let’s see how things will evolve.
That’s it. I hope for the best.
(photo by Slipping Away available at flickr)
Posted by Andrea Collet 
Posted by Andrea Collet 
Posted by Andrea Collet 
RSS - Posts