Thursday, December 06, 2007

New Providence Grays Site Up

Once every 10 years the Grays like to update our website (literally). I launched the new and improved version last night. Two years ago I tried just moving everything over to a WordPress blog, but basically, to make that work to everyone's satisfaction I would have had to do some serious template hacking, which I didn't feel up to. And then WP just stopped working entirely last spring at the worst possible moment (I suspect it had something to do with the host environment), which helped convince me I didn't want to be an amateur sys admin for PHP web apps.

So I finally decided that the most practical thing would be to do a few pages laid out by hand in iWeb, along with a Blogger blog, and a free PBWiki account.

I'm pretty happy with how the iWeb parts came out. Trying to create an authentic 1884 website is obviously futile, but I was able to stick to appropriate fonts and the pennant motif has precedent in the period, although less geometrically rendered.

The main feature at this point is the photo galleries. We actually had almost 3000 photos of vintage baseball games and tournaments that people had taken of us over the years that we hadn't done anything with. I went through most of them over Thanksgiving in iPhoto (it held up quite well) and set up annual galleries and other features. I'm hoping to get a lot more content into the wiki over the coming months, but I'm glad to get the main site up successfully.

No comments: