The thing about being a visual/graphics creature, you are constantly in a state of flux; fickle and fidgety.

I've been sketching a redesign of the site, a total overhaul of the entire site. Well, to be honest, I've been redesigning all the sites currently under the ongoing projects in-tray. This seems to be a constant thing but I've come to slowly accept that it is ok to do this as long as you agree to a finished design at some point and just move on. Until it needs redesigning again.

I suppose I could say practise allows you to gain experience and become better at tackling user interface issues. The thing I find about current designer sites is the focus away from functionality but more towards a similar, familiar mold. The balance between accessibility and form should lean more towards the former, at least for me. There is no point in perusing a trendy site where tiny black text on even blacker background is the main selling point of a theme, where a site is so flash-heavy it kills my browser, where the site is obviously optimised for massive screens only or ipod/ipad only.

I have been furiously looking at site designs lately, most of which uses familiar cms like wordpress, joomla/drupal, proprietary corporate cms from the late 90s that probably costs an arm and both legs. Most of these sites have lesser content than they appear to have so they are stretched out thin to compensate for all the SEOs that are attached to them. For a site like mine with content growing at an alarming rate, the task to design it is far from menial and this is why I'm still wavering about decisions.

At the moment, most of the things I want to display is put on hold and/or hidden as it would overwhelm the site with just too much content and I refuse to design the thing like your ordinary blog with posts laid out in sequence as if the previous is less important than the next. Then there is the focus which I've still yet to decide upon. Currently, this entire site was built in a couple of days just as a placeholder for later, hardly doing the content any justice.

Looking through the sites I have designed and developed, most of these suffer from the endless scroll of doom which happens when you have your content laid out as blog posts. I suppose this is okay if each chunk is bitesize and fits within the standard screensize of 960 x 480. On the other hand, one page websites though aesthetically pleasing is pretty much less useful when it comes to transparency.

Amusingly, I find the traditional magazine page layout as probably the most fitting for content-centric sites. Apart from the obvious familiarity of the format, a traditional magazine layout is specifically designed for the reader/viewer; chunks of information punctuated with relevant thumbnails. I won't go into the gridsystem format as that, I feel, is far too limiting and clinical for a site to be pleasing to the eye, much less for the digestion of information.