I’ve been stealing a few minutes here and there since early summer to re-do my main website. It had been on textpattern, which is a not-all-that-well-supported CMS (that’s “content management system” for those not familiar with the jargon–it’s the software that runs your website for you and keeps everything in order). WordPress (which I use for this blog) has in recent years become a fully reasonable CMS for academic websites such as mine (or Carrie’s). If all my sites ran on one kind of software, then I’d only have to keep track of changes in one kind of software.
I took advantage of the change to also change the look of the site radically to improve readability. The basic site design was a rip off of a few other sites I liked in the late 1990s, and not much had changed since then. So it was time for a refresh. I’m not done with it yet, but since my annual email to listservs advertising my Academe page produced its usual range of suggestions for updates (head on over to have a look), I decided it was time to go live so as not to have duplication of work. Some things are still unfinished, like a print style, but it’s getting there.