The New Smithery Site
On prompting from Tom, I thought I’d make a quick note on the new Smithery site.
Now, we’re still about five months short of the third Smithery anniversary, but this is site number four. I guess there are two extremes when it comes to building sites for your business. Build it once, and build it brilliantly, and then just tweak as appropriate as you need to. That does have advantages. Or, find a platform that you can continually iterate upon, stepping in time with changes in the look and the feel of a wider culture people are seeing elsewhere on the internet. With four sites in two and a half years, it’s easy to see which approach I subscribe to for Smithery.
It’s built on wordpress.org, the self-hosted version of wordpress.com, and this time around is using the excellent Port theme from the guys at Theme Trust which costs a not unreasonable £30. There are a few smart things they’ve done with page templates to make the WordPress platform jump through hoops and perform tricks I hadn’t clocked that it would before.
In all honesty, I’d started wondering about shifting off WordPress, but the creativity and ability of minds greater than I are still clearly weaving magic on top of the platform, so here I shall remain. Standing, shoulders, giants etc.
Not only is the site responsive (menaing it’ll reform to whatever device you’re looking at it on), it is also highly legible, perhaps in the way that Medium presents itself. I’ve put a couple of things up on Medium so far, but haven’t worked out why I should write things there when I can write them here.
A final word on the header images on the main page. As an experiment, I’m going to take pictures of MTPW > MPWT written on an Artefact Card wherever I go for a bit, and rotate the image when I get the chance. There are all sorts of ideas about making that rotation automatic based on nearest foursquare checkins, but that’s a lot of hard work for something I don’t know much about yet. So, until I see how I like it, and other folks like it, I’ll keep it handcranked.
(actually, new tagline for Smithery… keepin’ it handcranked since 2011… ok, maybe not…)