This is it the result of nearly four months of work: my new website. Getting here has been a dream come true. Over the years I've had many ideas about features and content I'd like to incorporate into my site but I haven't been able to due its rather limited format. Starting now, that won't be an issue.

This new website does not only have all the stuff from the old site, even the old forum accounts now work for both the site and its forums and you can use your old forum username and password to log in here to post comments or make guestbook entries. The new site also features new reorganized, redesigned forums as well as new content I've been waiting for years to write. One of them is something I'm sure many have wanted, it's a complete guide to phpBB template design, which explains the process, every step of the way. Other new content includes a tutorial on how your watermark images using Fireworks.

The new website will enable me to post and update content more easily, and more often. A part of this is my new blog which you are reading right now. My intention is to post something every day, wherever I am, home or abroad using it as a travel diary. I also intend to cover many different topics, not just web design and usability but also everything that I find interesting and noteworthy. I hope it will make an interesting blog to read, if not, you can always comment on it and tell me what you think! :)

Speaking of, usability, it's another thing I am very interested in but has been missing from my site for years. As you may know, I'm studying Cognitive Science and intend to major in usability and interaction design so a lot of my time is spent thinking and learning about usability, and fields related to that such as anthropology, psychology and linguistics. Expect a lot of thoughts, articles and tutorials on how you can use methods from interaction design and user-centered design to improve the usability of your website. Like with most intrinsically true concepts, it seems obvious once you learn about it and you wonder why you didn't think of it before, or you realize you always have you just never put any words to it. Well Cognitive Science is a lot like that, it's surprising, amazing and makes you appreciate human culture and cognition in a whole new way.

Getting here, getting this site done has taken time, and apart from the near four months of spending my spare time working, planning, designing and implementing it, it was preceded by a long time of finding a way to tackle the problem. It was a hard nut to crack, I needed a site backend system that was: easy to maintain, easy to customize and easy to design for. Having looked at many content management systems (usually called CMS for short) in the fall of 2005 I discovered Drupal. Getting to know it and learning how put it to use took a week, but when I finally grasped the concepts and could put it all to use I had an extremely powerful foundation to build my site on.

Drupal is about organizing content, about a logical approach to storing and accessing the content of your site. It's extremely light-weight, the essential core components are no more than 1.3 MB (incl graphics and theme) as compared to the TYPO3 CMS weighing an elephant class size of 36 MB! Included with the core components are enough features to run a regular website but if it's not enough for your needs you can download new modules from the drupal.org website. There are hundreds if not thousands of modules available and the likelihood that what you need done has already been done before is very high. Every dynamic aspect of this site is handled by a Drupal module, and thanks to a Drupal module for phpBB, the accounts and associated usernames and passwords for the site and the forums are the same. I will eventually write a tutorial on how you can run Drupal with phpBB yourself.

With the experience gained building this website as well as other Drupal sites I can now also offer Drupal consulting, helping you build, code, design and customize your own site with Drupal. So have a look around, if you like what you see and think "I want a site like this!", head over to the contact page and drop me a few lines.

Once again, welcome, hope you enjoy the new site, please drop a line in the guestbook with your comments if you like.

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