RCCGB FORUM

Death · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:25 am Post subject: Personal websites?

Hail everyone! Twisted Evil

I'm in a little bit of a quandry at the moment as I'm trying to figure out how best to design and lay-out my own website...And drawing a blank at just about every turn! Sad

Now a lot of ye already know me quite well, and know that aside from being a Metalhead, I'm also a more than capable web developer, programmer, and all-round computer user. However - Try as I might, I still can't seem to think of a decent design, layout, and method of operation for the next version of my website. Shocked

Now, some of ye may have already seen my current site; DieselDragon Mk. I and noticed that it has many varied bits and pieces, and this contributes to the problem. There's no one "topic" that my content comes under, so my website wouldn't make complete sense if I had all of my existing content available on a site with a truly "Metal" theme. Rolling Eyes

Likewise, I can't seem to think of any generic designs or layouts that would be appropriate that I'd like the site to have. Sad

About six months ago, I made a start on DieselDragon Mk. II which was intended to address the clutter problem and give a predominantly computer theme. Alas, I got the first few pages done and then - Like with just about every project that I take on - Neglected to complete the rest. There's a couple of completed pages up, but ye get a custom 404 error for most of them. Sad

I'm thinking that a content management interface (CMI) could be an interesting proposition for any future version of the site...But on the web-hosts that I use, such a system would have to be either particularly complicated (Have a very long and stressful development cycle) or dangerously insecure. I've already tried some ready developed ones, but havn't ever been able to get them working...So such a CMI would have to be written by myself from scratch to be what I would want. Smile

So, what I'm saying here is:
What I really could do with is input from ye and other people as to what might be best for my own site. Ideally, I'd like to have something that was fairly capable (That makes the most of my ASP scripting capabilities) and usable, worth visiting first time around and would be worth visiting again in the future. At the same time though, such a site should not take too much development to get built (Else it'll never get done) yet shouldn't be completely non-interactive as otherwise it'll be boring from both a programmers and visitors point of view. Smile

Something that I should add is the specs for the servers that I use, and some of my normal development conventions:

Max storage is 30Mb, but I'd rather keep the core "skeleton" of the site (General pages, templates, scripts etc.) under 512Kb for ease of use if possible,
Daily bandwidth limitation of 16Mb, but I'd sooner have no more than 4Mb use on an "ideal" day with up to 1,000 page loads,
Supported technologies/formats: HTML, VBS-based ASP (Over IIS 6.0), ODBC (Access databases), plus some limited MySQL support.
Remember that I try and keep the content size of my pages low so they'll load up in a reasonable amount of time (Under ten seconds) over a 12.28k dial-up connection, as still widely used in central and east-Asian countries,
Also: I like all of my websites to work properly in text-only, InternetTV and other older, more "basic" browsers...So Flash applications and Javascript could only be used in a non-essential role.
I hate AJAX delivered/generated content like the plague as it causes more issues with non-mainstream browsers and isn't all that user friendly either...So AJAX is right out.

So...Do any of ye have any ideas or other input that I could use with trying to figure out this blasted website hex that I'm trying to work my mind around? Cool

Farewell...And many thanks for any help in advance! Smile

>> Death <<