At long last, I have completed major work on my first complete site redesign in almost two years. I’m not exaggerating when I say I went through more than 20 concepts to get here before settling on this, one of the cleanest and simplest. I typically name my design concepts after ancient historical sites or mythical figures (Atlantis, Athens, Diablo, etc), but I couldn’t come up with one I liked that fit this design so I settled on the next best thing: Chocolate. Yeah, I don’t know either.

I haven’t done a redesign of RogersMJ.com since before I finished college (where I earned a decidedly non-design degree of Computer Science). Since then I have started working with real, actual designer-like people. I’ve learned a lot about presentation, and the vast array of designs and content organization methods I’ve run across have influenced my own methods. This design is a personal exercise to see how well I do at keeping the design elements simple and still present the content in an attractive way. Those who have been around these parts before will know that I have, at times, a tendency to get too friendly with gradients, drop shadows, and other visual cues that, while occasionally interesting, can easily overwhelm.

Since my last redesign, traffic has gone from 2,500 page views per month to more than 250,000, and judging by the emails I receive, the comments you’ve posted, and the browser stats you’ve left (most of you prefer something other than IE — you have the infinite, unwavering thanks of a grateful web designer), I’m blessed with a moderately tech- and web-savvy audience. Which brings me to the other, less visual part of this redesign: this blog, this site as a whole, will become more focused on a few core subjects. I haven’t entirely figured out the reorganization yet, but a majority of the content will fall under such categories as web design, emerging technologies and their relevance, internet legal issues and consumers’ digital rights, and probably a smattering of posts about amateur photography.

With a renewed focus on those subjects, I hope I’m able to write more frequently and provide you all with some interesting reading. I also hope I can get some feedback on the new design — good, bad, or otherwise.

After trying and discarding about a dozen different design ideas, I give you the new RogersMJ.com theme: Sovereign. This theme works in all browsers (with a couple visual oddities in Internet Explorer 6, of course), and I think it turned out pretty darn well.

I have long wanted to replace the old design that I launched late last summer; I thought it was too plain in some spots, and it also had some browser incompatibilities. Sovereign should last me awhile. It is written as a Wordpress theme, and I will be releasing it once I’ve cleaned up some of the code and am certain there are no major bugs. Now that I finally have scratched my design itch, I’ll be getting around to a lot of content I’ve been wanting to add for awhile — mostly stuff about CSS and web design.

If you notice a problem anywhere on the site, or want to let me know what you think of the new design, just leave a comment!

Well, I finally wrote a Wordpress theme completely from scratch, and this is the result! I hope you like it; I’ve always wanted to design a dark theme, and I had this stroke of inspiration one day. The design was actually easy; getting it into the Wordpress templating system was not. I’ve always tinkered with other people’s themes, but never written one from the ground up. It was an experience, and I’m still not completely done. So consider this a beta test.

Those esteemed vistors who have been around for awhile (thank you, you know who you are) will notice the return of features and content absent since the downfall of 3xmk.com in early February. We have a polling system again (please vote!), and the popular Google and AIM Triton articles are back — but all the comments that were made on them are not, sorry. Make some new ones!

Also, a new feature: anyone can contribute to the site by writing their own news post. Once you click Save, it will show you that your post has been saved as a draft. At that point, I will go in and review your submission. Once I publish it, the post will appear here on the front page under your name. Cool!

Still to come: the Gallery will return, hopefully complete with the hundreds of photos that were in it before. Stay tuned.

Finally, I am collecting links for a list on the sidebar of rogersmj.com. If you have a web site and want to trade links (as in, I post yours and you post mine), let me know!

One final word about the theme…I’m using some unconventional tactics in this theme as far as page inheritance and titles go, because of the particular behavior I wanted. It did require a couple hack functions that work for me, but I wouldn’t want to release them to the world. And that’s fine, because before anyone asks: no, I will not release this theme. I’m sorry, but the whole reason I did this was so I could make my site look unique and still use Wordpress to manage it; I’d like to keep it unique. Maybe one day when I move on to another design…but not today.

Comment and let me know what you think!

Since I can never leave anything alone, and I never want to use the “default” style for anything (yet another reason why I make Blackberry themes), I have created a new design for my site. It’s intended to be clean and simple, which is good for both the users — simple equals easy — and good for me, because I have enough work to do without doing a complicated site design right now. So I hope you enjoy it, I’m still working out the kinks and polishing it up. Let me know if anything seems broken or amiss.

Hey everyone! You might have gotten here while looking for 3xmk.com…sadly, that site was lost when the horrible, horrible web host Mher.org terminated my account because spam was being sent from one of the addresses I setup for a friend. They never emailed me, never told me anything. One day I went to look at my site, and it was gone. I am trying to get Mher.org to send me the backup of my site, but even if they do eveything will never quite be back to normal.

So it’s time to rebuild. 3xmk.com, while originally for my roommates and I, eventually only became a personal site for me anyway, so that’s why my primary site will now be rogersmj.com. I’m going to work on putting back up all of the popular pages (like the incredibly popular Blackberry themes I created), as well as some of the more popular photo galleries. But it’s going to be a long process, and I’m a busy guy. Those of you who came here looking for something, I ask for your patience — I have a half dozen sites to get back online (thank you, Mher.org), and I’m still in school, and I have a job, and I have a fiance. So you can imagine what I don’t have — a lot of free time.