I've been building websites in one form or another for a long time.Some have supported my own writing and creative projects. Others have grown into publications of their own. I've also developed sites professionally and for clients, which has given me plenty of opportunities to discover both how much a good content management system can do—and how quickly a website can become a mess if nobody thinks about how all of that content is supposed to fit together.
This isn't really another collection of articles from the websites themselves. Those sites have their own audiences, content, and identities. Instead, this is where I can talk about the websites I'm building, why they exist, how they're structured, and some of what I've learned while creating and maintaining them.
More Than Building Pages
I've always been more interested in building content systems than simply designing individual web pages.
A good website needs somewhere sensible for everything to live. Articles need categories. Navigation needs to make sense. Images and media need conventions. A site that starts with twenty articles should still make sense when there are hundreds.
That's one of the reasons I've continued working extensively with Joomla, the content management system behind ScratchWriting.com and many of the sites I've developed over the years.
I like the flexibility Joomla gives me to think about a website structurally. Categories, menus, modules, tags, templates, custom fields, access controls, and extensions can become building blocks rather than limitations.
Of course, that flexibility also provides almost unlimited opportunities to spend an afternoon obsessing over three pixels of CSS.
I have some experience with that too.
Websites With a Purpose
The projects collected here can be very different from one another, but I try to begin each one with essentially the same question:
What is this website supposed to do?
Sometimes the answer is publishing. Sometimes it's supporting a business or organization. Sometimes it's creating a useful resource around a particular subject. And sometimes it's giving an idea enough room to grow into something much larger than the page where it started.
That purpose should influence everything that follows—from information architecture and navigation to visual identity and the way content gets created behind the scenes.
It's also why some Scratch Writing projects eventually become their own destinations. Once a site develops a sufficiently distinct purpose, voice, and audience, I think it deserves an identity of its own.
Scratch Writing Studio can still be the workshop where it was conceived, built, and supported.
Inside the Workshop
Over time, I'd like Sites to become something of a portfolio and development notebook.
Here you can learn about the websites I'm making, what they're intended to accomplish, and some of the thinking behind them. That includes Scratch Writing properties as well as selected client and professional web projects where appropriate.
I'll also occasionally share some of the lessons that come from working with Joomla, developing content architecture, refining navigation, creating visual systems, and trying to make websites that are manageable for the people who actually have to keep them running.
Because ultimately, that's what interests me most about web development.
A website isn't finished when it launches.
That's when it starts living.