Now in two columns!
It’s a new year and therefore time for a new site design — this one’s based on the content managment system Textpattern, like many of my academic and professional sites (see, for example, Science for Peace).
I used a magazine-style two-column format for the main informational pages — the homepage, the project page, and the CV. This decision was mostly practical, and was meant to correct a major shortcoming on the old CMSimple-based website. Basically, I had a very nice Lightbox-style program which allowed visitors to preview any of my website projects by opening an overlay screen on top of the project page. The trouble was, the overlay would float to the top of the page, requiring a visitor to scroll up the page to see the results of their search.
So I turned the page on its side, converting the old side menu into a drop-down and setting the text in two columns for greater readability (newspaper wisdom says that you should keep your line widths to an alphabet-and-a-half, a rule which often gets entirely bent out of shape on the web). The wider page — especially with the double columns — makes it a snap to go from one sample site to another without having to scroll all over the place.
CMSimple sites
Many of my playschool sites, and also my Bob Simons memorial site, use a flat-text content management system called CMSimple. I like deploying it on simpler sites — three-to-six-pagers — as it lets users edit their own pages without running the risk of breaking the templates and layouts (though if you know what you are doing, it’s also pretty easy to soup up a basic CMSimple site into something quite stylish).
kgsimons.org
This site has been active since January 2008.
Before kgsimons.org, my personal website was www.interlog.com/~ksimons, an inelegant name but one which came free with my ISP service. The site still exists, albeit as a museum piece. It was originally called “The Wonderful World of Monochrome” because for many years, I only had a black and white monitor. Following a family holiday in Bosnia, I renamed the site “A Streetcar named Oslobodenje”, which — though it is no longer updated — it is still called.
The background image is of Hypsibius dujardini, a tardigrade.