New Web Site Design

A new web-site design is not a trivial thing. It takes a lot of thought and effort. Especially when web design is a newly blossoming interest rather than routine. I have learned a lot and have thoroughly enjoyed the process. Because it has been a learning process as well as a productive process there have been several iterations of the design not seen by the public.

Because we are so image oriented we have for many years had a web site to demonstrate previous work. As far back as 1999 we have developed our own image gallery using a scripting language, Python, to generate html from a series of images on our computer. It has served us well over the years and was in a constant state of refinement. Every year or two I would work through a makeover.

The most recent motivation has been the number of clients viewing our web site on a variety of mobile devices like cell phones and tablets. In late 2013 I settled on a new design to accommodate the idea of "mobile first" web design and implemented it in many publications for clients. The main web site at pepperchrome.com languished with the older design because I knew that would not go far enough.

I wanted a way to publish a series of articles like a common blog that would be easy to maintain and expand. My old system was a little hard to maintain as it had evolved a lot over the years. It was hard to expand and there was a lot of code left over from the early years that I wasn't sure was even in use.

After a long and thorough search I narrowed it down to a few static web site blog generators that were written in Python, my programming language of choice. The one that seemed easiest to modify to meet my needs was Nikola.

Nikola is plug-in based. It is actually a bunch of plug-ins run together. That architecture meant I could write a new plug-in using the best part of my code from 2013. What you see here is the result. The gallery section has hundreds of pictures showing previous work in a modern mobile first way, and it has Nikola's very fine blogging system.