Concerning literary home pages, I think http://nobodyhere.com is one of my faves. It has distinct character. But it’s hard to find stuff on the site. Should be searchable.

Andy Campbell’s homepage at http://www.dreamingmethods.com is enticing. Each piece is well-presented on the home page. And the page shows signs of graphical brain activity also.

http://cmart.design.ru is a very well-done Russian home page that is erm partly literary. Conclave Obscurum is the site’s name.

My home page is very slowly wending toward being a work of art. But I also want it to be really good as a tool to nav and find stuff on the site. I need that in the home page because the site is big and you nav the site by repeatedly returning to the home page.

TextWrangler is a free text editor for the Mac. Firebug is an incredibly useful web development tool that you can add on to the Firefox browser – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

What is TextWrangler? And Firebug? Thanks for the tip on WAMP. I suppose I should install that on my windows system.

I wanted to blend both parts of the site into one design so it’s probably resulted in a homepage that looks somewhat bloggish and a blog that doesn’t look conventionally bloggish. The key was finding a background image that would work in both cases and I reproduced the top navigation in both parts of the site too.

I designed the static site in Dreamweaver and edited the WordPress theme (which is based on the Sandbox theme) to match using a combination of TextWrangler (for Mac OS) and the Firebug extension for Firefox. I also use a MAMP (Mac – Apache – MySQL – PHP) local development environment to see how my WordPress theme works in action. (WAMP is the equivalent for Windows)

Books that I found helpful in this regard were ‘WordPress Theme Design’ by Tessa Blakely Silver (PACKT) and ‘WordPress for Dummies’ by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

I also noted that the whole site is a WordPress blog. I hadn’t noticed that when I initially and superficially visited the site. The homepage is not overtly bloggy. Although I suppose the does indeed define the body of the homepage within a WordPress one column, fixed width, centered page (with a header) template. Menu up top. But, still, it is not overtly bloggy in the impression it gives.

It seems you have put a lot of effort into working within the WordPress theme but trying also to broaden it out into a more site-like range. Congrats.

What are you using to edit the theme? I have noted that using Dreamweaver to edit a WordPress theme is rather a lot less than WYSIWYG because of the PHP composition of the theme.

So I have been using Artisteer. But it has its limitations. For instance, the Whitepress theme of netpoetic.com is not within the purview of Artisteer. The tabbed nature of the Whitepress theme, I mean, is not within the purview of the Artisteer editor.

I agree, designing a blog feels like working in a factory. Collaborating and/or creating content for a blog feels quite different, one appreciates its usefulness – quite a helpful environment in fact… Although, why do comment input fields tend to be so cramped? To encourage brevity perhaps? In which case… I’ll just say thanks, Jim, for your comments.

Yes. The form of the blog, at least most of those I’ve seen, de-emphasize whatever is not recent on the blog. Although it’s reachable via the ‘archive’ or the search function.

One could change that a bit by creating a page accessible from the main menu that highlighted some work from the archive. But the whole form of the blog is currently focussed temporally on the presentation of current work. Which is one of the reasons it can’t be anything but. At the moment, anyway. Or no?

I’m currently putting a blog together. WordPress. Using a tool called Artisteer. I find it hard to get real excited about blog creation though. Feelin like a factory f f f f where’s my godel yodel?

Had a look at http://www.crissxross.net . It’s lookin real good, Christina. Much more available than what I recall of the previous version. I don’t recall Tailspin, for instance, and am looking forward to checking it out, along with much more I see on your home page that I haven’t yet.

Since I wrote the post on the homepage, I’ve added a bit more functionality to the http://vispo.com homepage. The controls at top left. These are for getting rid of the nav altogether and turning the background into foreground.

I’ve been thinking a lot about homepage design myself as I’m in the process of redesigning my own for http://www.crissxross.net/ …very slowly, in fits and starts. And there’s the rub, every hour you spend redesigning your site is an hour not spent on creating new work or finishing work-in-progress. But then, if new work is too difficult to find or ‘packaged’ in an off-putting way…

As you say, a blog is, by design, easy to search and navigate, if it’s a conventional blog, that is. I’m not sure it’s always the case with a creative collaborative blog like http://remixworx.net, especially with its arcane post titles. I worry that there are a vast number of gems buried deep in the blog that visitors may never find. It’s something I hope to address (I’m crissxross, one of the collaborators at remixworx) – but more on that later, I intend to write a piece about it which I’ll post on netpoetic.