Well I finally found the time to redesign my site. With Hammersmith United Charities going live I had more free time to actually work on this site.

So I did.

After finishing my usual process of analysis I came to a following conclusions:

• I was going to change the IA
• I was going to change the markup language
• I wanted a more ‘interactive’ feel to the site

Information Architecture

As well as classification and arrangement of information I wanted to keep a common theme among the naming of the categories.

Therefore Journal has become the Notebook (keeping the design theme).

Markup Language

In case you missed the title of this post I decided to go with HTML 5. There are also some CSS 3. I was keen to try these newer models of markup, especially as a lot of the modern browsers (Firefox, IE8, Opera and and Opera) support them already.

Thumbs up especially to Opera on this.

Then I discovered there was a way to get it working in older versions of IE the decision was made.

Interactive Feel

The old site was starting to feel a bit static. I wanted a more interactive feel. Something more ‘Flash‘ Like (for want of a better term).

But I didn’t want to use Flash.

I also didn’t want it to be ‘AJAX’ crazy. I was looking for enhancement. I wanted to degrade for users without JavaScript.