benspencer.com begins

Posted on 22 July 2008 at 07:22pm. 4 comments.

After shirking my responsibilities at the gym, and over a week of very late nights, my online home is finally live.

I have been very keen to get involved in the active and friendly web standards community for quite some time, but all of the ‘benspencer’ TLD‘s were taken and I was never quite happy with any of the alternative ideas that I had. When benspencer.com finally became available in June 2008, I rolled up my seelves and began work.

My focus is on creating clean, simple, usable websites which conform to web standards - I hope you’ll agree that this website ticks all of those boxes. Em measurements have been used throughout the CSS so that the layout scales perfectly when the text size is increased.

For the content management system, I am using the wonderfully flexible and extremely powerful ExpressionEngine. It allows me to keep my precious markup clean and my content organised just the way I want it.

The photos I’ve used on the website were taken either by myself or my partner Laura, who has been very patient with me over this last week or so. We don’t claim to be expert photographers, but I’m quite pleased at how the photos I’ve chosen have turned out.

Also on display is my latest activity on flickr, last.fm, twitter and tumblr. These have been implemented using a combination of ExpressionEngine plugins (Magpie RSS Parser, Twitter Timeline) and the tools available on their respective websites (flickr badge creator, tumblr goodies).

There is still quite a bit of work to do on the site, but for now I am just pleased to finally be a part of this ever growing community. You can expect to hear my thoughts, ideas and experiences on a whole range of topics via the blog, as well as some tips and tutorials which I hope will be of use to many people.

Comments

  1. Matt // 29 July 2008 at 09:12pm

    Glad to have you in the proverbial pool!

    You’ve done an excellent job with this first design. I especially like your treatment of the icons in the footer.

    I’m looking forward to any future updates. And if you come across more cool EE tips, be sure to share them.

    By the way, I saw your tweet about considering moving everything over from EE to WordPress. As someone who uses both at his day job, all I can say is DON’T. You’re already doing things on this site (like your portfolio) that, while completely doable in WP, would feel far more hacky.

    EE is infinitely more extensible than WP. I love WP for small sites – and I’d definitely recommend setting up a test site for yourself – but for sites of any real complexity, EE will always win out.

  2. Ben // 29 July 2008 at 10:18pm

    Very interesting to hear your thoughts on ExpressionEngine vs WordPress Matt - thanks a lot. It really does depend on the project I suppose.

    I’m thinking of giving WordPress a thorough test on a small project that I have coming up soon. I’ll let you know how I get on!

  3. Ahh Jim Lad // 1 August 2008 at 10:24am

    Nice site Ben…Eh Ben!!

  4. Ben // 2 August 2008 at 11:54am

    Thanks Jim! Yes Jim.

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