Yep. Another Redesign.

For the handful of you who may be watching this space, here’s a quick post about this weekend’s reboot of the blog (again).

Yes, I did just re-launch the CasJam blog a few weeks ago.  Basically the goal there was to expand the blog, bring on guest writers, and transform it into more of an industry design blog than my personal posting place.  Well, with today’s reboot, I’m reversing that decision and going back to basics.

What Went Wrong?

In a nutshell, I quickly realized that the expanded blog route wasn’t for me.  As I’ve been known to do in the past, I bit off a bit more than I could chew.  Managing an expanded blog with multiple authors and a strict posting schedule was way more work than I had anticipated.  But I could have made it work if it wasn’t for this more important reason:

I lost interest in my own blog.

I wasn’t happy with the content being produced both by myself and the writers I hired and edited articles for.  I felt the content didn’t add the right value to the larger conversation than what I had hoped.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m able to add more value when I keep things loose as I had done before the expansion.  Which brings me to…

Where We Go From Here…

As I said, it’s back to basics.  I believe the key to a successful blog is to write when inspiration hits.  Let your ideas and passion dictate where you take your content.  So that’s what I plan to do moving forward.  I’ll go back to posting whatever I find useful, thought-provoking, inspirational, and educational.  Whether that takes the form of personal posts reflecting on my journey, callouts to my publications elsewhere, my interviews with fellow web workers, or links and things I come across, it will all pack in value.

I constantly set higher and higher standards for myself and my creative work, and can’t help but do the same with this here blog.

On The Redesign

Aside from the content itself, I view this site as my personal sandbox for building up my skills as a designer.  This time around, my focus was on simplifying and stripping things down to the core.  The idea was to keep it as open-ended as possible, allowing for the freedom to take this blog, the content, and focus in any direction at any time.

It’s also a stomping ground for me to try out some of the latest technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and mobile web design.  I’m still in the process of implementing a few ideas on these fronts, so stay tuned…

That’s all for now