I don’t know what I was thinking. When Ben asked us, “We need a web site. Who wants to do it?” Before I realized what I got myself into, my fingers were already doing the Blackberry dance and responded “yes.” I guess some part of me wanted the challenge.
Building a good web site is always a challenge. To date, this is about the 8th swing dance web site that I’ve put together. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best sites share one fundamental characteristic: they don’t make you think. They’re easy to navigate, easy to update, work across different browsers, and doesn’t look like it was ripped off from a template.
Actually, it’s a lot like coming up with good choreography: familiar but unique. And that is the challenge.
So as I was researching on the latest and greatest CSS techniques and frameworks, I came across hybrid. Hybrid combines best practice bulletproof css from Blueprint, Tripoli, and 960 along with a powerful widgetized blogging/CMS platform, Wordpress. If you don’t know what that means, it’s like being able to take moves from the California Routine or the Big Apple and put it in your choreography. You get something familiar that works, so that you can spend time on the unique stuff.
I’ve tried to keep the page layouts pretty simple, not super-sexy, but definitely usable. I wanted to make the site easy to update, so I installed the backend on Wordpress using a custom child theme based on This was my first time creating a custom Wordpress theme, but hybrid makes things pretty easy once I got over the learning curve.
Anyway, the site is still in beta. So some things may not work 100%. We’ll make changes as we go along. Kinda like how Ben choreographs (MUAHAHAHA …).
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