ALL-NEW! FRESH! MORE SPIFFIER! RevMitcz.com v3.0
(try mousing over the circle in the upper-left corner once you’re on the site for a nice surprise)
Normally, I’d write some long-winded thing about the design process involved with a re-launch, and discuss the ins and outs and specifics of choosing certain ideas over others bla bla bla. I’m still going to detail a few things regarding the relaunch but to put it simply : I was hating my old site. It was too cumbersome to update, I didn’t think it reflected much of my current goals and lifestyle, and basically… it was in bad need of a refresh.
I’ve also just started to use iPhoto + Flickr, so now updating Photos in my gallery will be a simple, streamlined process. Expect to see shitloads of photos show up in the new gallery as I take the time to organize everything. Since my videos these days are all uploaded to YouTube or Google Video, the old interface I used for streaming Quicktime movies was outdated and useless. Furthermore, I’ve made my other sites a bit more integrated into the main RevMitcz.com interface. That’s more of a marketing decision than anything else.
In the past few weeks, I’ve looked around at a number of other comedians’ websites – both world-renowned, and that of lesser-known “up and coming” comics. I’m pretty sure none of them wrote their own guestbook script from scratch, or coded their own Flickr-retrieving gallery pages, or hand-coded their own “send to a friend” script, or designed all their own desktops, buddy icons, and what-have-you. I feel good in knowing most comedians ain’t got shit on my site. Exception, of course, given to DaneCook.com. Maybe one day I’ll sit and redo my whole site in Flash and make myself all superstar-like. But for this refresh, it was overkill and I don’t like not being able to direct-link to anything. I have a Flash solution for that as well, but again.. overkill. Besides, Dane has a marketing team and a webdev team that put that thing together – I’m sure he oversaw the project and gave specific instructions to his people, but in the end I guarantee it wasn’t free. My site didn’t cost me a dime to redesign. I know it’s a lofty goal to go up against “America’s Hottest Comic”, but if I don’t shoot for the stars I’ll never get off the ground. And before you say it, yes I’m well aware I’m nowhere near the same league as him – I’m talking purely about websites here.
The old site was never meant to include high-profile links to my MySpace page, Mitcz.com, AuralSalvation.com, et al. – so I did this half-assed thing w/the flash intro that linked to all those places, long after the fact. Hell, RevMitcz v2.0 launched with a blog that pulled in my LiveJournal, there was no AuralSalvation.com at the time, MySpace was just beginning to take off, and YouTube was completely non-existent. My new site has a little area at the top of every page that links to important secondary sites in the Mitczosphere. Should I later launch another site or two, I can simply redesign that top area to include the links and voila! done.
Up until last week, I sat around playing with various redesign attempts for over almost 2 months. I even had a beta version up that I used for sending photos to people, or videos. I really wanted the new features of the site available immediately.. but I was hating the design. Not unlike how RMv2 got it’s last-minute redesign, RMv3 was made in a quick “wait! what if I try…… THIS?!?” – inspired almost exclusively by the Flash intro that I made on a whim. From there, it was a simple matter of figuring out how to style individual pages and give it a clean, unified look. As these things go, I’ll end up feeling constricted and bored by this site in less than a year and I’ll set out to redo the shit from scratch yet again.
The final decision I had to make with this redesign was to shift focus away from the multi-faceted purpose of the old site – designer, comedian, musician, actor, blogger, model – to a much simpler “entertainer, with a focus on comedy” fashion that the new site has going for it. There’s no design portfolio, cause frankly I don’t need any more clients and I’m hoping to retire from design in the next few years. The music is gone cause they were all half-done attempts anyway and on the uber-d/l, I’ve got a new project I’m working on that I hope to unveil before the year’s end and I don’t want it tainted by another shift in focus or getting mixed in with half-finished shit from years ago.
If you get a weird PHP error on the front page, that’s my RSS script to pull in my blog. For some reason, it doesn’t want to use the cache folder I created and I don’t know enough fancy shit to make a MySQL solution as of yet, but that’s my next goal. I’ll have it fixed soon enough, but a simple refresh of the front page will fix it for now, in case you have that problem.
And now, stats for the geektastic :
# of beta redesigns before it went final : 4
Technologies utilized : AJAX, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, hCard, Flash, RSS
# of lines of hand-coded CSS in rm3.css : 859
# of pages created for new site : 16
# of javascripts used : 6
# of images (not including gallery/downloads) : 56
# of Flash movies (not including YouTube videos) : 3
# of Validation errors in the XHTML : 7 (all of them b/c of the Flash)
Approx # of hours spent since first attempt : 65+
Now what are you waiting for? GO TAKE A LOOK!
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