I like building things. I especially like building things that either I personally use or that represent me in some way. I like to tinker with stuff. To learn. To design. To think up what I want and to then go make it reality. Hence when I sat down to design my personal website, I decided to design both the content management system and the visual layout from scratch.

Unfortunately, doing so is easier said than done. I a that CMS for my site that allowed me to control everything from a minimalistic admin panel. It worked well and I was pleased with it. But over time, like any hacker, I thought up more and more ways to tweak it or features that I wanted to add to it, and my project’s complexity grew quickly. And while I had the ability to code all the features I wanted, I didn’t have the time to instantiate and debug them. Also, I was aware that as the complexity of my site grew so the odds of my making a fatal security mistake, being as how I had no one to review my code. So over time I became less and less thrilled with the idea of using my own CMS. After about eight months I finally convinced myself, with much reluctance, to switch to using WordPress, and that’s where I stand today.

But, for good or for bad, I have designed my site’s layout. Even though I can’t use my own management software, I can at least design how my site looks. I’m very picky about how my things look, from clothes to stuffed animals, and my website especially so. I like simple, black/white/grey-scale, cornered themes for everything (my clothes, my desktop, my website, etc) and finding a WordPress theme that fit that description was practically impossible. There were only one or two themes I could find that I would consider using even after extensive hacking, so I designed my own. It’s very simple, and while I would call it classic some others might call it ugly, but like it.

Between my WordPress settings and my custom design, there are a few ways that my site differs from most personal websites.

1. I use sharp corners.
   One of the trademark characteristics of the Web 2.0 movement is soft, round corners. On everything. Buttons, boxes, you name it and it’s round.
   
   Personally, I don’t like round things. I like to see sharp, crisp lines and sharp, crisp edges to those lines. A corner is where it is, and doesn’t apologize for it. Corners provide distinctive, solid boundaries that have an easily measurable area and perimeter. It’s simple and solid, which is what I like.
2. I use a gray-scale color scheme.
   Apparently there was a memo: The colors black and grey are out and the colors white and light blue are in. To complement their smooth, round corners, people are also using light, soft colors. Themes based on light blue, light red, and soft green are everywhere. Maybe those colors are supposed to be good for your eyes; regardless, it’s not my style. Personally, I like black, white, and grey color schemes. It’s simple and classic, and doesn’t distract the reader. Combined with sharp corners, it makes for a fairly classic layout almost no matter what you do.
3. I (usually) don’t allow user comments.
   I do this for a few reasons. The biggest reason is because I’ve noticed that the comment section of most sites usually contains precious few useful comments. Occasionally someone posts something on-topic that’s helpful, but that’s the exception. Most comments are empty complements, empty disagreements, flame wars, or spam and add nothing to the original article at all. The only reason I could think of to allow random people to contribute content to my website would be if I thought they had something useful to contribute, but since most of them don’t, I don’t care to store or read it. And I’m not alone in this opinion.
   
   Overall, I see no benefit in letting readers comment on what I’ve written. If they feel very strongly that they need to contact me over what’s been written, they’ll e-mail me. If they aren’t willing to, it probably isn’t that important.
   
   User comments kind of follow from the Web 2.0 “user-generated content” idea, which I’m less than fond of. Realistically, I almost never read the user comments when I read someone else’s articles and I don’t think many other people do either, given that about one out of a hundred readers will bother to comment. So if comments are useless to me and they’re useless to my readers, I figure there’s no point having them.

There are the most significant ways and reasons my site differs from the average modern personal site. If you disagree with any of my decisions, complain to this guy, he loves to hear from you.

And nothing is worth writing or designing unless it works. And code that works best usually complies with the commonly accepted standards. Although W3C standards don’t dictate what works and what doesn’t, I strive to keep my site as compliant and cross-browser compatible as possible.