You might have heard me mention it in passing before, but the site is going through a rather severe re-implementation at the moment. I haven't finished the design yet, and there's a number of things that I still have to figure out how I'm going to do, but it's progressing nicely. The main goals of the new design are:

• XHTML 1.1 Strict compliance (Currently not even strictly HTML 4.01 compliant!)
• Separation of data and layout (ie: good use of XHTML and CSS)
• Content Enrichment and Consolidation
• Templating
• Address usability issues (eg: the Blog comment system)
• Add per user (both hosted and guest user) functionality
• More Features!

Actually, there's a whole lot more reasons, but I just can't think of them at the moment (edit: except for an inline spell checker - thanks Michele).

That's all backend stuff. I could feasibly leave the front end looking pretty damn similar (only a few changes), but the current one is kinda dodgy in places. It needs fixing. So I've done some scratching around on a whiteboard for a general sort of look and feel. Looks very familiar doesn't it? Subtraction is the main influence, but there are influences from other places too.

In the past year or so I've been tinkering with html, css, actually reading through the standards, reading a lot of design themed blogs, and working with Michele. I think I'm developing a fairly solid foundation in web design skills and principles (for an amateur anyway). The new Content Management System (CMS) that I'm designing / writing should help make my corner of the internet a lot better. I've got a lot of ideas for it, and even though some of them are pretty ambitious, I'm fairly confident I can pull it off.