Web Design State of the Art
Modern web design and development change fast. Faster than fast. Quicker than quick. Faster than light. Latests trends include work being done revolving around responsive design amd you can read everywhere about it. However, I got tired of working with big CMS to hold webpages. They are just to big for my needs, they hold more features that I would ever need (just like MS Excel) and they come with one huge problem: Maintenance. Installing updates, upgrades and security patches or plugins can become a pain in the neck. Let’s not even talk about custom theme programming knowledge you need in order to create or cusomize your site design.
So, if you only need to blog a small amonunt of posts and create a simple site and you have some HTML/CSS background and you are not afraid of writing something like <p class="..."> yourself, but more specially, if you want to take control over things, then you definetely need something different. Something “easy”. So you should check out Jekyll static web and blog creation.
Later, I discovered Twitter Bootstrap which is a powerful tool to create custom sites, small and large, but then I discover Jekyll which is a some sort of a simple Ruby based engine for static sites (imagine some sort of a small subset of Ruby on Rails) but actually using Liquid engine. Jekyll allows me to be able to “art direct” every page just like I would create my PowerPoint presentation slides.
Jekyll also has helped me familiarize myself with the basics of HTML5 and CSS3, learn new technologies like Less to create more powerful and efficient stylesheets (using tools like CodeKit to automate really helps on this task), and finally learn about how to create really cool sites both on computers and mobile devices without a hasle with responsive design.
So Simple Theme, by Michael Rose
During my search of a new tool I found Michael Rose site by coincidence, searching for technices to draw on Paper by 53, which by the way, it’s the best tool for the iPad if you like to draw. He explained how he swithced to “static mode” with Jekyll, and he also had a Theme for Jekyll… what else could you ask for ?
So take a look at his work. There are 3 responsive Jekyll themes made by Michael Rose. My favorite So-Simple Jekyll theme is a great tool for starting up a new blog using Jekyll machinery.
