Here’s a quick note to say that the site is back up. After much deliberation — and even though I received a lot of positive comments about the temporary holding page I launched the other week (as pictured in the screenshot above) — I decided that having a virtually-content-less website wasn’t doing me any favours, as realistically it will be quite a while before I can find a decent amount of time to work on the new design. I’ve got a load of things I want to blog about and I need a working website on which to do that.

On Twitter, Chris McQueen asked:

Curious whether your holding page creates intrigue or frustration amongst users? Any research been done on this?

Chris McQueen

I’m curious, too, and while I’m not aware of any research (I guess it would vary from site to site, anyway), it was this question that made me think about putting the site back up. And even if users were frustrated, it probably didn’t compare to how frustrated I was by not being able to blog! (By the way, the main reason I took the site down was to recover from the Pharma Hack, which — although cleared up — had left Google with a nasty version of my site in their cache.)

Your input is valued

Of course, there are many things that frustrate me about this version of the site, which is why I was reluctant to put it back up. So, in the interest of getting some genuinely useful feedback, I’d love to hear what you like and dislike about the current design, and perhaps what sort of things you’d like to see in the next version. Feel free to let rip: as I said, I don’t particularly like this version anymore, anyway.

In the coming weeks, I might try and find a day to work on some subtle improvements; a re-align rather than a complete redesign. Your feedback will help inform that.