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Redesign of LocalizingJapan.com

My blog Localizing Japan has needed a redesign for some time. The old design was a modification of a theme someone else had created. I initially set up WordPress quickly with the first decent theme I found so I could begin writing. I did not expect to keep it for so long. Well, it's finally done.

The design is very minimalistic with lots of white space. I want the content to be the focus, and I think I achieved that. It is professional, functional, and most important, it does not get in the way of the content. The extra effort to get the typefaces and line spacing right really makes a difference in readability.

Now that I have the design taken care of, I just need to start writing posts again.

Working on my Home Page

I've been working on my personal home page and finally got it to a point where it can go online. I still have much to do, but now I have something I can work from.

I decided to go with a UT Longhorn type of burnt orange theme for most things. I ended up doing everything by hand in PHP and Javascript. jQuery is really cool and I plan on doing more with it in the future. This blog is just hand coded at the moment. But I will probably convert it to WordPress once I finalize everything.


New Home Page

I decided to redo my personal home page. My old Web site was nothing more than my resume and random little pages I had worked on. My plan for my new site is to have one place for all my personal and business related content. Also, I have multiple blogs, so consolidating them all in one place is a good idea.

At first I thought I would just keep it simple and do straight HTML. But after working on it, I realized it isn't really possible to make a 'site' with just HTML anymore. I considered using Drupal for the entire site, but doing anything seemed like a big hassle. Drupal is pretty cool and I want to try to use it again in the future. But for now I just want to get my site up. So I decided to just use straight PHP and do all the content reuse myself.