As I write this I am taking a hiatus from, once again, coming up with a new design for my blog. The major question I'm sure that's on everybody's minds is "Why do you redesign your blog so often?" After pondering this question myself I have come to the conclusion that I just enjoy coming up with new designs. This in turn begs the question why go live with every new design? Why not just create the designs on the side and leave the live version alone? Because I end up liking what I've just created more than what's currently implemented.

The relationship I have with any piece of art I create is generally a strained one. I'm very self-critical of everything I create. It is very rare that I make something that I like for any extended period of time. I think the problem stems from the fact that every time I see one of my works I begin finding flaws. These flaws are not necessarily seen by others, but I can see them. This is generally fine for, say, a movie or a drawing. I don't have to look at them once they're done. My website, however, is something I see fairly often. I come to see if people have left comments, to post entries, etc. It is hard for me to turn a blind eye to any flaw I see in the design when I am faced with it over and over.

As stated earlier, I also just plain and simple like creating new designs and trying out new things. As I surf the internet I am constantly bombarded by all sorts of different color schemes, layouts, etc. and these intrigue me. I get all excited and before too long I've got Photoshop and Notepad++ up and running and I'm hacking away at the latest entry of my long list of designs. Excluding the Wordpress and Blogger themes, I have made live three designs for my blog since June of '05. That's not including the designs I had from '01 to '03, anything I created for any of the various other sites I've managed (YPN, my church's website, Digital Double), or the designs that never saw the light of day.

I realize that changing up the site design so frequently is not necessarily a good thing, especially in a commercial environment. It can confuse people and probably would piss some off to the point of not returning. Granted, there are sites that do this (digg comes to mind). However, since this is my personal blog, my sandbox as it were, I'm not worried about too much. I generally try to keep the overall aspects more or less the same breaking everything down into navigation, body, extras.

Though it is beyond the scope of this article, one thing I have messed up through all the redesigns is my URL naming conventions. Usually when I roll out a new design I'm also rolling outa new CMS (conent management system) to go with it and these don't always use the same naming conventions for internal links. This causes links in older posts, google's index, etc. to become broken and raises general chaos. I'm happy with my naming conventions now and this will remain the same even when I do change the back end. Permalinks will be exactly that.

So, that is the "logic" behind my madness, tune in next week to watch the evolution of my designs and learn the rules behind them.