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Something seems different. Did you lose weight?

Friday June 16, 2006

Posted In: Site-News | Comments: 5 | Written By: Kai Conragan

We started the original design for the site during a very hectic and stressful period in time: right before we left for this trip. In between packing boxes and trying to convince Julie’s mom to take the cat, we threw the first design together. As such, the design was hurried and never fully actualized. We tried to polish it up when we got to Hawai’i, but it just didn’t come together how we wanted- the final result felt unpolished and a bit contrived. More importantly, after a few months of traveling we’ve gained a much better understanding of what we want this site to be.

We enjoy putting together our longer posts and will continue to do so. However, we both wanted the ability to post shorter entries to the site as well- something the previous design limited us from doing. The previous design required images for every post due to the coding of the templates. We originally thought this would be a way to force us into taking more photos. However, we didn’t anticipate the time that would be involved for each and every post, and lately we’ve felt that site is always a week behind our actual trip. It would usually take us 4 or 5 days to put a post up from it’s inception, at which point we already had more to say. We also don’t want every post to have to be an essay. Occasionally we just want to say hey, here we are or check out this food we just ate or can anybody tell us what the hell is happening on Lost? (ok, don’t really tell us, we’ve still got 3 episodes to watch).

This design is the result.

On the surface this may seem like a simpler design, and in many ways it is. Often times the simplest solution is the best. But underneath lies a much more thought out and developed grid system which allows for much more flexibility with content. I think once you spend some time clicking around the website, you’ll agree. Also, the previous design was a bit graphics heavy and, with the slow internet speeds here in Southeast Asia, we wanted to speed up the load times.

But wait, there’s more…

In addition to the overall look and feel, we’ve addressed a few issues that were bugging us plus added a few new features to the site. They include:

• You can now add comments to the Gallery section of our site. We’ve been wanting more direct feedback on our photographs, so this feature was long overdue. We’ve posted some new image as well, so go take a look through the images and when you are done let us know what you think.
• We’ve made recent posts more visible so that they don’t get lost once a new post has been added. Hopefully this will encourage more discussion within each post.
• We’ve improved the archives section as well as made it easier to browse posts by category (such as Indonesia for example)
• Images within an article pop-up in a slick new fashion.
• For those who don’t know us (or perhaps forgot), we added an about section to provide a little background on who we are and what we are doing.

That’s about it now for. We’ll continue with our regularly scheduled broadcast in the next post. Hope you enjoy the new design and please feel free to let us know what you think.

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