A stroke of brilliance, maybe

I just had what might be my greatest idea in a while. This comes at 7:15AM on a Saturday, after being up since 2am, and after 4 shots of espresso and 2 nicotine lozenges. I’m still recovering from all the bad luck of the last couple of weeks (brown recluse bite, dead computers, double funerals, etc.), and the stress of having a lot of angry clients because I’m behind schedule and my work seems to be suffering. I was on the edge of a breakdown yesterday so I went to bed at 7:30, got up early, and things are looking much brighter today. Anyway, here’s my bright idea…

I want to redesign the main page for Circle Six Design, but I want to do something besides the usual “About Us”, “Portfolio”, “Recent Clients” rigamarole. So I had this idea to make it into a second blog with a bunch of static pages to handle that stuff. I was going to make a Flash header with some custom Actionscript that would keep the thing from looping constantly as you navigated the site, and insert it with SWFObject so that it was relatively unobtrusive and accessible.

Then it struck me that I could use Wordpress categories to organize posts into “Portfolio”, “Events”, “Upgrades”, “Freelancer Profiles”, etc. This would allow me to create a cool menu that went into each category and within a category the most recent posts would always be on top. And creating something like a “Recent Clients” list would be a snap, I’d just have to call the most recent posts from the “Portfolio” section and “Work in Progress” section and list their titles. Each entry could have an expandable image, a link to relevant materials/websites and a description. It would always be in chronological order. There could be subcategories for different types of work, “Ecommerce”, “Small Business Websites”, “Print Design”, “Television”, etc. The front page would be a standard blog format with all of the most recent posts mixed together.

The format of a post would be standardized, the cropping of the image and the layout of the description and links would be consistent between entries. I think I could even insert a thumbnail as the optional excerpt for the post and create a visual representation of the portfolio. That way I’d have multiple options for creating templates to display the portfolio. So many options.

Well, that didn’t take long to explain. It’s a really simple idea, but I think it’s going to work quite well. And now that I’ve posted it, you can all steal it. I don’t care. Actually, I hope you do… it will validate my belief that I actually have a good idea once in a while ;-).