Middle Ear Media

Terracotta half-life gets a new look for 2010

January 27th, 2010

Ter­ra­cotta half-life is a trop­i­cal funk band from Mar­quette Michi­gan that I founded over five years ago. I cre­ated the first web­site for the band in 2005. It was a sta­tic site built with HTML and for­mat­ted the “old” way with lots of nested tables and inline styles. It was a real pain to update. Over the years, its been evolv­ing with the band and now looks like this.

The site has gone through sev­eral revi­sions since 2005. It was given a proper style sheet, the lay­out was changed sev­eral times, and of course the actual con­tent was mod­i­fied (many times).

In 2008, the site went through a major over­haul with a tran­si­tion to a Word­Press based site. Built with PHP and using a MySQL data­base, it was now a dynamic site with blog­ging func­tion­al­ity and an RSS feed. How­ever, I used a generic Word­Press Theme (slightly mod­i­fied) for this ver­sion of the site and was never com­pletely satisfied.

Now, its been com­pletely redesigned again. This time with a new Word­Press Theme that I cus­tom designed. Although the site has been com­pletely redesigned, my goal was to main­tain a sim­i­lar feel. So the logo, back­ground image, and color scheme have essen­tially remained the same.

The site is now more user friendly with a hor­i­zon­tal nav­i­ga­tion bar just under the logo as well as at the bot­tom of every page. This should make it much eas­ier to nav­i­gate the site.

Also, the blog has been moved to the main page instead of being sep­a­rated into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories and buried in the site some­where. This should make it more inter­est­ing to vis­i­tors imme­di­ately upon arrival.

You can now sub­scribe to the blog via email as well as RSS feed.

The Photo gallery is now bro­ken into sep­a­rate years to make photo brows­ing easier.

Of course there were a lot of other small changes made that I won’t go into, but let me just say that I am much more sat­is­fied with the site now.

terracottahalflife.com

Tags: Terracotta half-life, Web Design, WordPress, WordPress Themes

This entry was posted in the Web Design category.