Ok, I finally realized that I’ve stupidly been spending so much time trying to figure out how to build what I want that I haven’t clarified what I exactly do want to build with regards to the structure of my site. Therefore, the following will hopefully describe this.
As I noted before, I’d like to give the feeling of different spaces to my site. For example, one space would be focused on business, another on gaming, another on my personal life, and so on. As you visit each space, the weblog format is the primary thing you see. On the sidebar or footer area of each page though I’d like to have different types of content displayed that would also interest the reader. Some different types of content would be books, movies, music, photos, and so forth.
So if I was in my business space, my blog relating to my research and development would be the main thing that readers see. On the side though, there would be the top five books relating to the what I’m working on (i.e. blogging, web design, Internet, Web, etc). In addition, I’d also display the type of music that I usually listen to while working. Again, I’d display photos or images that relate to my work which could be artwork in my work room to photos of people I’m collaborating with on my ideas and so on. In effect, I want this space to emulate a space in real life. When you walk into my den office at home, you’ll see these same books, the same artwork or pictures that I’m displaying, and even a stack of music CD’s that I listen to while I work.
Now just like how my content is layered and displayed for each space, I’d like my entire site to be layered as well. For example, I want my business space to be the primary thing that you see when you visit my home page. However, I want my other spaces accessible as well but layered deeper into the site. The deeper you go the more personal the spaces get until you’d reach my personal space where I talk about life in general, family, and so on.
There you go that’s it in a nutshell. Doesn’t sound that difficult to create does it? Well the difficulty lies in creating it in such a way that your content remains flexible and easily manipulable, so that all of these groupings of different types of content by category and space are dynamically generated on the fly. More on this later.