Work has officially begun on a new version of my web site, It's All About the Rupees. I don't really want to give out many details as yet of, since the site's still in early development -- as in still developing the basic layout -- but I can say for sure that it's going to be a radical overhaul of the current version of the site.
Really, the current version of the site was never even planned; it just sort of happened while I was experimenting with CSS. "Hey, I wonder if this will work." "Cool, it does ... sort of. Maybe if I tweak this..." "You know, this isn't looking too bad. Maybe I'll add some content and actually upload it." That was the basic thought process behind the site. I was playing around with CSS properties on divs, developed a liking for static sized divs with scrollbars for overflowing content, and voila: It's All About the Rupees was born.
Of course, it had some "birth defects" that had to be treated, and it never quite fully recovered from them. ... But that's why I'm developing the new version of the site. The current version was a fun concept to play around with, and good for helping me learn a good amount of CSS, but it's too gimmicky and limiting to be a serious project. There are things I'd like to be able to do with the content in the future which just wouldn't be possible with the current layout.
The development of v2 isn't completely centered around the content, though; I'm coding the site in XHTML 1.0 Strict, instead of HTML 4.01 Transitional, and I'm going to be using PHP rather than relying on JavaScript. So this, too, will be a learning experience, it's just that I'm putting some actual planning into the site's layout so as to accommodate future content.
My main goal with developing v2 is to create a decently professional looking site on which to put my various written articles while learning XHTML (though that isn't too much of a step from HTML 4.01) and PHP at the same time. So whereas my original goal with v1 was simply to learn CSS, and later I decided to use it as a place to put up my articles and graphics, I'm thinking of v2, from the start of the project, more in terms of the whole. And the end result, I hope, whill be a wholly better product.
With all that said, however, don't be expecting to see Rupees v2 any time soon. (Unless you're one of a few privileged people I may decide to show previews to.) Web design has always been mainly just a hobby for me, so I'm not in any hurry to complete v2, and I'm thinking of this as a somewhat long-term project anyway. But I'm not abandoning v1; I'll continue to update the current incarnation of Rupees (providing Tony's site goes back up or I get other hosting) whenever I have something to add to it. My work on v2 will be concurrent with my maintaining of v1.
And wow, look at this. For barely telling anything about the actual site, I've managed to stretch this post out quite a lot. Go me, goby! (For those of you going "WTF?" that was a bad Animal Crossing pun.) But anyway, farther details about Rupees v2 will be posted when they're decently finalized.
