It’s that time when I start thinking of making updates to the davidseah.com website! The last time I made significant changes was last March, when I added a new front page with a new overall design. This year, I need to make some functional layout changes so I can add advertising links from BuySellAds, a service I’ve been intending to try for quite some time. However, there’s a problem: I don’t have a suitably-sized area to fit the ads without breaking the layout. Grrr!

There’s also a few other changes I’d like to make:

• Responsive Design!
• Clean up the code and CSS!
• Get away from the “I am a blog with a sidebar” look. Was fine in 2004. Not so much in 2014.
• Add some fancy “custom page” support built on fancy web frameworks and nodeJS.
• Move some plugin functionality into the core theme files.
• Take a pass at simplifying the front page.
• Switch source control to Git, which is growing on me over Mercurial.

The primary goal, though, is to widen the sidebar by about a hundred pixels. It might be nice to use a framework like Twitter Bootstrap, which provides a lot of the responsive stuff built-in, and it would be a nice basis for the “fancy custom page” support I’m thinking.

I’m thinking that the best approach is to identify and modularize the special functions I’ve added to my WordPress theme, then back-fit them into a new Twitter Bootstrap theme. It would be quite educational, I think.