I’ve finally gone through with beginning to create a new homepage. Or is it “blog,” now? Vanity-internet-place-with-my-words-and-pictures. And it only took three and a quarter years.
I chose WordPress because it combined versatility with ease of use. Most importantly, it would give me an easy way to include primarily written articles in addition to image galleries, as I saw with sites like Modelers Miniatures and Magic and Craig Clark’s site. I’m looking forward to squaring the circle on that one, and using a blogging platform to host a site whose flagship feature will be image galleries, video files, and 3D model downloads.
My current plan for the site is to begin by duplicating and updating the content of my old site.
- Upload still image galleries
- Upload movie galleries
- Upload 3D models (I should probably check that the archives are up-to-date)
- Copy over any remaining oddball pages from the old site, such as my build-a-Stargate guide
Next comes the exciting part, the content I couldn’t have put on the old pages if I tried.
- Copy image old image and animation commentaries from various internet forums I posted them to, and provide links to each commentary with the corresponding image in the galleries. Backdate them to reflect when they were originally created. If all goes well, this will result in posts that are ostensibly older than the WordPress platform itself. This will be cheerfully ignored.
- Copy over other content along these lines, such as my recent and recently delayed Battlestar Galactica rewatch and review series. I can’t really think of anything else at the moment, but I’m sure something will come up. If you have any suggestions for the Best of David that should be copied over to here (and you probably do, since the only way you’d be reading this is if you were systematically going though the blog, since God knows it won’t be anywhere near the top of the heap once I actually announce this thing).
- Announce this thing! Open it up to search engines, pimp the link out to friends and forums, and set up redirects from the old site. Redirects that go to the corresponding pages, if I’m really feeling my oats that day.
- Regular publishing, including cross-posting commentary on new images, animations, and models, articles on whatever I feel like writing about, and, most importantly, a portfolio section to set apart my professional and personal work. I intend to cover that work to the same exhaustive extent I write about my personal work, to the extent which I am allowed to by my employers.
At some point, I’ll also have to find a proper theme for the site to rejigger the look and feel, but for now, content must be king. To the coronation we go…