Level Orange

When looking for work late last year, I recently got in touch with a former employer of mine, Bob Lamons, and we discussed building out a site for his new B2B marketing venture, Industribrand (as in “industry brand”). Now, I’d worked for Bob for nearly six years at his ad agency, Robert Lamons & Associates and when that operation closed its doors, I moved on to publishing for several years. Still, I jumped at the chance to both rebuild a working relationship with Bob as well as flex some more of my skills in web design. As I’m sure often happens in the design industry, I was once again working for a former employer, albeit in a slightly different capacity.

Back in 1998 or so, I’d built the RL&A site (ads2biz.com) entirely by hand, one page at a time. Eventually, I retooled the site using one of the early versions of Movable Type mostly out of a need to make adding and editing content a breeze. Similarly, the Industribrand site would need to be just as easy to use, while still being powerful and flexible. Enter WordPress.

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WordPress, that is. I’ve been going back and forth on whether to continue using Movable Type (which I’ve been using for the most part of the last, oh, seven years) or try and keep things moving smoothly with Drupal (which I love, but at times also hate) OR to try something different after some excellent time I’ve spent with WordPress over the last couple of years. Last week, I made my decision and now you see this spankin’ new site! I’ve got some bigger ideas in store design-wise, so this is only the first phase of what’s to come.

I finally got around to implementing gravatars on this site. Of course, right after, I read from Jon Hicks about a recent outage that lasted for several days. Still, I decided to add them just as another little doo-dad to dress the place up.

I’ve been playing with a lot of plugins lately, especially for Movable Type and WordPress, for a project I’m working on. So far, I’m very impressed with WordPress’ extensibility, but the PHP is something of a barrier. I like MT’s simple “upload file and insert tag” methodology, and really look forward to MT 3.2, which supposedly includes a better plugin management scheme.

So…to test this thing out, if you have a gravatar, leave a comment and let’s see it!

Movable Type Plugin directory

WordPress Codex – Plugins

WordPress Plugin Repository