The changes on this site weren't entirely for the sake of change. I've wanted to change to Drupal for a while, but I just didn't want to spend the time. WordPress was working fine and I had no real reason to change. Now I do. I've been building some other sites for family and family businesses using my personal hosting account. These sites have for one reason or another all changed to Drupal in recent months. One of Drupal's advantages is the ability to build multiple sites on the same code base. A multi-site installation. Other platforms have some form of this ability too, it's not unique to Drupal. In my case though, it was a very helpful ability. The only thing keeping me from using it, was this site. Due to my hosting structure, this site's directory was the most obvious location for an installation like this. Now that I've switched this site over, the rest of them will be moving over to share the code base shortly. As each one moves, that's one less code base I need to keep up-to-date. I have a little variability in the modules the various site's use, but it should still give me a 60% or more reduction in labor for Drupal updates. Same sites, same code, same function, 60% less work to maintain. I may be busy, but I just couldn't afford not to take advantage of a time saver like that.

After a lot of thought, I've switched this site over to Drupal. I really like WordPress, and I plan to continue designing for it, but for my purposes Drupal will be a better fit. While I could have matched the new site structure to the old one, I decided to restructure. My old site map had become a little conveluted and I took this opportunity to straighten it out. I'm using PathRedirect to ease the transition, and PathAuto make the new sitemap easier the maintain.

For  those who might be interested, here's a few more details of revised site:

• This site theme is built on the Zen theme using sub-themes.
• I'm using Mollom for spam control
• I've continued to use Google Analytics
• I've used a dev version of LinkToContent to make in-site linking easier.

I'm in the process of making some signficant changes to this site, and I seem to have crossed feeds with another site. Hopefully this post will straighten things out. The transtion to Drupal from WordPress is underway.

Sounds like I'm misquoting Robert De Niro. Are you following me? Are you subscribing to this site? You should be. Subscribing to sites that interest you can save you a lot of time. They let you know when there's new content, so that you can read on your own schedule.  You can also follow me on one of my two Twitter accounts, or see what I've bookmarked on Delicious.com. If you like anything you see here, let me know by writing a comment. Yo can also use the Share button at the bottom of each post to let others know what you think.

• Tschet of Twitter
• RivenDesign on Twitter
• Tschet at Delicious.com

Website's in general, and blogs in particular, are all about links. Sending people where you want, to content that they want. Are your links easy to find? How about if your site was viewed by someone colorblind or partially sighted?

Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" the functionality, and possible benefit, of some system or entity. - Wikipedia

If your viewers can't find your links, can't navigate your site, can they benefit from your content? The problem I often see with links isn't with the main navigation, but with links in the content of a page. Too often I see content links that don't contrast enough with the main content to be easily identifiable. They blend in to content, and therefore are useless. A link unseen is a link unused. In this sentence, which words are links? It's a trick question actually, because every word is linked. I've used a bit of inline CSS to change the appearance of most of them. I've also suppressed the hover and focus psuedo-classes on some of the links. This means that they don't change when you mouse or tab over them. Not a helpful change if you're trying to find links, but one I've seen in use. The important part of links is that they are consistently identifiable. They need to be seen to be used. Links can have just about any effect applied to them you'd like. Choose from things like added color to bold, italic, underlined and overlined text. These can be done singly, or in any combination. For accessibility purposes, you should use at least two of them. One thing that accessibility guidelines agree on is that color should never be the sole method of passing on information. WCAG 1, WCAG 2 and Section 508 all have similar things to say on this subject. If color is your only identifier, it only takes a poor monitor to make them invisible. Use multiple signals to identify links and everyone will be better off. I'll go into the CSS of links in another post, but for now think on this. The design of your links is important. Color and style, underlined or not, background color or not, these are all can affect the flow of traffic through your site. How important is visitors finding your content to you? Thank you to Glenda Watson Hyatt for starting the discussion that lead to this post. Now I suggest reading her post on 3 Tips for Making Your Hyperlinks More Usable.

It's not Spring yet, and I'm not actually cleaning anything, but the title seemed to fit. If you follow this site on my RSS feed, you'll notice that things are a bit out of order. I'm updating posts and it causes them to jump to the front of the feed.  Mostly this involves making sure the posts have correct tags and categories and so forth, but I'm also checking links and content. My recent style update included some major structural revisions, so I'm still making sure nothing broke.  Updating should be done soon.

While minor changes to this site are still ongoing, the awkward phase should be over. Up until now this has been a static HTML site with a WordPress Blog in a sub-directory. As of this morning, it's all WordPress. The awkward part was configuring WordPress such that it could maintain my static home page, and keep the blog's permalink structure intact. I've taken a bit of the previous static content offline for now, but I'll add it again if I decide it's relevant. Permalinks should all work as before, but you might have to resubscribe to the RSS feed. The feedburner feed is unchanged, but the site's feeds have moved.

Graphic Design: The art and profession of selecting and arranging visual elements-such as typography, images, symbols, and colours-to convey a message to an audience. - Encyclopædia Britannica

I think that that may be just the beginning of what Graphic Design is, but it's as good a place to start as any. Graphic Design is to me a blending of Art and Communication. Creating an elegant and interesting framework with which to present information.

As a Graphic Designer I have to be both an artist who can visualize a design, and a technician who can bring that design to life. It is an odd combination of artistic inspiration and technical know-how, a graphical jack-of-all-trades.

This site is my online sketch book. A place to try new ideas, collect resources for my work at Riven Design, and write about design. As I have time I add to the resources page as well as the blog.

Keyboard Only

This site is utilizing skip links to improve mouseless browsing. Skip links are links to another part of the page that allow visitors to navigate their way around a web document, without having to cycle through a huge list of links. They will be seen when tabbing through the page, and can be activated by hitting enter key when visible.

Access Keys

An access key is a keyboard shortcut that allows you to immediately jump to a web page or specific part of a web page. Activating access keys varies between web browsers and operating systems. In Internet Explorer they are activated by hitting the Alt button and the access key at the same time, while in Firefox it is Alt, Shift, and the access key. On a Mac, it is Control and the access key. The access keys for this site are:

• accesskey "s" - Skip to main content
• accesskey "n" - Navigation
• accesskey "5" - Return to top of page
• accesskey "1" - Return to home page
• accesskey "o" - Accessibility page

As you can see, I changed the WordPress theme. Still fiddling, but since this site is rarely visited, I figure it wouldn't really matter. As in previous versions, the CSS and page structure is mine, while the PHP is a mish-mash of the two default themes and some of my own work. Hope you like it.

Update: It's change a couple of times now, and is currently using Drupal.