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.

You have your site setup properly, a beautiful design, perfect content... that's everything right? Do you have RSS feeds? Can people subscribe to your site? Quick, off the top of your head, what's your site's feed called? Do you know? What's the feeds URL? Is it available from any page in the site, or just the home page? Do you have multiple feeds? If so, where are they available from? Here are a few things you can do to make it easier for your users to subscribe to your site.

• Make sure your RSS feeds have easily identifiable names. This is configurable in a lot of content management systems (CMS).  "News" might make sense to you, but when your subscriber has multiple feeds they won't know who's "news" is whose. For a single feed I would suggest the site name. For multiple feed sites, I'd suggest the site name and an individual identifier like "site name - news" or "site name - blog".
• Make sure your feeds are easily available. If a site has a feed, but it can't be found, it's not benefiting you. It might makes sense to make the news feed accessible from the news page, and the blog feed from the blog. That's a reasonable organization. You might however, want to also make them all available from one unified location. I'd suggest the home page,  or a dedicated subscriptions page if you have a number of feeds available.
• Do your feeds work? Subscribe to all of your feeds, and check them regularly. Make sure that they work, and they display your content as expected. A surprising number of RSS feeds I see don't display properly, or have errors that don't allow them to be viewed at all.

Don't overlook the details of your site. It can be a little thing like a malfunctioning or poorly named RSS feed that keeps your from that one important contact you needed.

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.

IE PNG Fix - TwinHelix

This script adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now you can have full translucency and no more ugly grey borders! It requires only one line in your CSS file, and no changes to your website HTML. <img alt="" /> tags and background images are both supported.

A beautiful addition to any site you want IE6 compliant. I'm fond of PNG files with transparency myself, this makes viewing a site using PNG transparency possible for IE6. Update: I installed it on this site, and it's working. IE6 doesn't display my scrollwork quite right, but the transparency is working. SInce I didn't install the version that allows for a repeat, it just isn't repeating the images on the left side or top scrolls. On my personal site, I can live with that.

My most recent project at Riven Design was transitioning a Typepad photo-blog called Cascade Exposures to WordPress and it's own domain. The new site debuted today, and I'm really thrilled. Go take a look, Jan's work is impressive, and always worth a visit. While you're there, make sure you subscribe so that you'll never miss anything.

As you may have notice, I haven't blogged much lately. One of my recent endeavors has been doing web design at Riven Design. I've been doing web design with an emphasis on high quality imagery and accessibility, and some really fun print design as well.

I'm still using the CSS Menu Writer that I got to evaluate. I have to say it's very slick. I'm working on a WordPress site that I hope to reveal soon, and it came in very handy. I've worked on tabbed navigation with CSS before, but this was relatively painless. A few quick menu adjustments and it gave me a set of beautiful tabbed menus. Of course it's never quite that easy. I had to track down a bit of a z-index glitch in IE6 and 7, but that was hardly the fault of the people at WebAssist.  The menus performed perfectly in my base page in all browsers. It was only when I introduced some additional CSS of my own that I had an issue. Why can't Microsoft come up with a browser that works as well as the new Chrome by Google seems to? If you're looking for a Dreamweaver plugin that takes some of the work out of clean CSS menus, I'd suggest giving CSS Menu Writer a look. Even if you use it like I did, to quickly build a base menu that I further customized, it is an incredible time saver.

There's a great article about Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts at Lorelle on WordPress . You might think to yourself that you don't want a blog, but WordPress can be used for much more than that. It would be reasonably easy to create a website powered by WordPress that looked nothing like a traditional blog. WordPress gives you the ability to easily post information in an orderly manner. Organized by time, date, and category. Using the methods listed in Lorelle's article, you could customize your site by essentially giving each category different CSS characteristics. This would give you a wide range of formatting and organizational solutions for your site.

JavaTechniques is a nice site with, to quote it's author, "a small, but growing collection of Java howto's and examples". It's also a nice example of how to put together a collection of content over time with WordPress as the CMS.