I know change is hard. I know many readers liked, and miss, the old look. A few have even whined at me. But let me explain… As I said in a earlier post, I wasn’t planning on changing systems as fast as I did but after deleting the 600th spam comment of the night (which was happening more and more often) I was finally so pissed off over the issue I just went and DID it to make it finally stop. Call it a “rage induced moment of clarity”. It worked for me.

The hardest part of being a web designer is trying to sell the client on drastic changes to what they might have grown comfortable with. In a blogs case you have two clients. The blogger and the reader. The readers associate the blog with the look, they get comfortable with the decor. I’ll admit I did makeover for me.

The classic VBB design integrated it into my new professional site over five years ago. In the terms of design and the net, that’s damn near geriatric. Everytime I entertained a change more people would arrive to rave over it (Seems I’m ahead of my time for being retro). So I would say “six more months”. Well that turned into a few more years. For someone in my profession it’s downright unforgivable.

I’ve always said ART is permanent, design is not. That’s why I hate the term “graphic artist”. Art is expression and emotion, it’s only purpose it to be looked at. Pondered. Examined and extrapolated. Art is timeless. Design’s purpose is to sell. To whore an idea, a look, a product. Design is fleeting and mercenary. Evolutionary and extraneous. Design has a shelf life. Both art and design are powerful things, they can even cross pollinate, just don’t confuse them. They are what they are. Design that doesn’t change doesn’t make it art, it just makes it stale.

VBB/VBD was stale.

I got sick of looking at such an old design, and got tired of MT. I had a domain that I wasn’t “using” other than in redirect. Verybigdesign.com’s redesign is on the list for “Things wot need doin’ this year” since BADLY NEEDS updating and a major makover. So, the look of the blog would be changing regardless. And if it’s going to change and move out on it’s own it seemed stupid to update to MT 3.3 on a domain I didn’t want to keep the blog on requiring it to be installed somewhere else as well later. VBB’s install I had was so olde skool it was never converted it to mysql, so it was all cgi-bin run so that’s another huge PITA and slooooow since there was over 3100 entries. It took an hour to rebuild! It was a mess.

Will this look “retro super highway” look stay? Dunno. But I felt it at least needed “Jenifying” until I know what it is I want to do with it for sure. I’m still poking at WP so if you visit and it’s gone all wonky, you know I’m playing right that instant. I hope you like it in the mean time (bonus points if you get the right image…

Also, I have to admit I just wanted to try wordpress. Everyone keeps raving about it, and I like to learn new apps liek that. I have to say I like how easy it is to add things and it’s simliar enough to other apps I’ve customized that I’m not feeling terribly lost.

Anyway, thems the reasons. I hope you stay, I hope you get used to the look if I don’t change it right away, but I promise to not let it get stale again.

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