I’ll get to the point - I’ve been designing and coding webpages for a long time. Ever since I was really, really young - probably one of the only seven year olds who was more into webmastering and coding than he was playing little league baseball. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my experiences, it’s that, as a web designer (or maybe just a perfectionist?), I can not commit to a written release date.

Which is why, when I started the next “home made” Servo-Macs layout and website, I would not commit to a specific release date. To be as vague as possible, I simple stated that it ws “coming in 2008″. I still have enough faith in myself to believe that will hold true. But, in my mind, I had a specific date in mind - August 25th, or better known to me as the last day of summer before school starts once more, and development becomes a side project and slows down. Obviously, August 25th is here. And I have nothing for you, today, that’ll return Servo-Macs to it’s roots. That is, today, and tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, when you type in http://servo-macs.com, the page you’re looking at right now is exactly what you’ll see.

But I do have something.

My development process on layouts has remained largely unchanged for the last couple of years - I would split it up into three “phases”, which I like to refer as milestones. Servo-Macs b4, the internal name for the upcoming site (you won’t see any nods to b4 on the actual site, though), is no different. Each “milestone” has a specific focus, and when I shift my focus, the phase I’m in also shifts.

Milestone 1: This phase begins with a .PSD mockup file of what I want the end project to look like. I then take that PSD file, open up Taco HTML Edit, my copy of Photoshop, and go to town duplicating the mockup as close as I possibly can, and figuring out a basic idea of how I want the navigation to work. What will the content of the site be? How will the users get there?

Milestone 2: After I’m done transferring the mockup over to an actual, functional website, with a basic idea of how I want the site to work, I refine my original mockup, refine the navigation system, and start implementing all the main features of the layout. This is what I’m currently on in Servo-Macs b4, and have been for around two weeks now.

Milestone 3: Now that the layout should be pretty much all done and settled, with all the features in place, I go ahead and include all the content of the site. A minor layout tweak here or there, though, is not unheard of (again, refer to me being a perfectionist).

Servo-Macs b4 at the end of M1 (left), Servo-Macs b4 today (right).

As you can see, the changes in M2 from M1 are what you’d expect - I’ve got the actual news system (FusionNews again, my personal favorite) all set up, and have just refined parts of the layout that I thought would be fundamentally better choices. In the M1 phase, I thought of having the Blog be a subpage, with the main page being something else entirely, but I could never figure out what I wanted exactly, so now the blog is the main page like it always has been. You’ll also notice that I’m toying with something pretty new - I’m going to be using categories in FusionNews to display the site’s content. “General”, “Photos”, and “Videos” will all appear on the main “Blog” page as I upload them, while the Photos page will only display the Photos, and Videos only the videos. One of the few things that’s keeping me from really pushing on to Milestone 3 is the sidebar - the thing’s got a lot of work ahead of it before I go move along.

Finally, as a cherry on this post, I’m offering you guys a preview of the whole entire webpage, so you can look at the actual thing for yourself. The link I’m giving you guys will be updated periodically as an ongoing “beta” program, so I’ll also be setting up a feedback page into this current site.

Check out the future of Servo-Macs here.