Since I've been on spring break, I've had a lot more time to relax and let my creative juices flow. There's been so many things I've been meaning to do but school and work leave me too exhausted. Especially web design. I can't sit down and create something when the day has left me so tired, so I jump at the chance to get things done. In fact, I think I'm trying to get too many things done...

The first thing I started working on was the new design of the Virginia Chapter of NAPUS's website, which my mom is a member of. As you can see, the design is horrible as I made it when I was like 12. That thumbnail to the left is actually a sneak peak of the new layout. The whole site is almost done, I just need a better, easier way to manage photo albums; and for that, I think I'm going to use Flickr and phpFlickr to manage and display albums. Creating albums will take 5 minutes or less, not more than an hour like before. Plus maintainability will be much easier with better implementation of a CMS.

I'm starting to think Planet Blacksburg needs a makeover as well. I did the current redesign last year around May or June, so it hasn't been too long. But since then, we've implemented the Photostream, PBTV, and better photo management, making the homepage look cluttery and disorganized. So I'm currently playing around with some ideas to make the interface a lot cleaner and organized, including finally extending the width of the site to 950 pixels. I've been against such large sizes for a while for a variety of reasons, but with more and more content coming in and more people stretching their browser windows, I think it's time. This design will take a bit longer unless I really get on a roll one night, so stay tuned.

I'm also trying to come up with a new design for this blog. As you can see, it looks terrible. It's been really difficult for some reason, I guess because I can go so many different ways with it, and I don't want it to look like utter crap. My great uncle also asked me about redesigning his website. If I really wanted to, I could get all of this done in a week's time, but I think it's just too many projects to do at once and it's inevitably going to spill into the coming weeks when school and work pick back up again.

I'd like to applaud Andy and the rest of the design/production team for creating the new layout for ZDNet which launched on Sunday. What a beautiful site. It truly gives some inspiring ideas as to how to go about redesigning PB. Revision3 also launched a new design recently which is also fabulous. I thought their site looked horrible with the old layout, but they've really stepped it up and brought better attention to their content in different ways, including the carousel at the top. Brilliant work by these two sites.