When we started with verysimpledesigns.com last December, we did things low profile as we were frantically going through our designs to decide what could be used for download, what could be turned into a tutorial and we were not really sure what direction to take yet.
Thing is that we design stuff from logos to stationery and fabrics, but also create illustrations and digital art and as we are both techies, we do website design (front-end and back-end) as well.
I am quite familiar with CMS systems, but when we decided to use Joomla for verysimpledesigns.com, I had to learn a lot of new things. And as we just wanted to get the site going, we decided to use a freeware template, install some plugins and that was that. No big publishing campaign, so not a lot of visitors, which gave us a lot of time to sort things out and add some content to the site. We had some plans for reworking the design, but sofar it has just been plans. Today we started to talk about actually changing things.
We like the current layout. It is distiguishly different than most other websites – that conveniently use 2.0 to indicate their style, but we all know that again is just a buzz word. I like many of those layouts, but somehow one looks like the next and the next again. We do however need to redesign the website, to allow for more modules, get the breadcrumbs working properly, depend less on plugins, and optimize the site further for SEO. The site is quite easily found by most search engines, especially now all our image are slowly being indexed, but we sure could use a few more proper links. We are considering a link exchange page too (realizing that we are not that interesting yet, but at least we can support the sites that we consider to be cool).
So template design for Joomla, we keep the purple but I do not know where it will take us next. We also will finally implement forums so we can create better interaction with our users.
Lots of plans that will keep us busy for a while again.