Back in 2011, my brother gifted me the domain registration and hosting for meloking.com and smallmelo.com. In case you were ever curious where my business name came from, it was my little brother. Thanks, Matt. He also designed my business logo and built my site for me. Who has the coolest brother? This gal.
But of course, we all know the only thing that is permanent in life is change.
This semester I’ve decided to take a Web Presence class through CNM in an effort to start intentionally cultivating my online presence. I’m trying to let this course fuel some of the changes I’ve been meaning to make for my business. Once of those changes was to transition smallmelo.com to a private server and redesign on the website. Huge thanks to my dear friend, Mr. Charles Reid, for the server architecture support.
Here’s the scoop on the new smallmelo.com digs.
Location
Smallmelo.com was transitioned from shared hosting at Dreamhost to a private little Ubuntu bungalow hosted by Digital Ocean.
Plumbing
The website is being served up using an Apache web server. MySQL and PHP are being used to power WordPress.
Amenities
I’ve added a blog to the site and have migrated my portfolio over from meloking.com.
Gitea was installed so I could have a little Git with my tea in the morning. I’ll eventually migrate all of my private repos from Github.
Style
I’m sportin’ the monochrome wordpress theme and the same color palette the site had before (#ffffff, #000000, #41a3b5), with a different emphasis. The site’s banner imagery is of the Albuquerque area, downloaded from the USDA’s Geospatial Data Gateway. I flipped the bands around and desaturated it using this technique in ArcGIS Pro. I then threw the image into Photoshop to darken it up a bit more. I recreated the logo Illustrator using a 30 pt oval brush.
Welcome home.
So there you have it – smallmelo.com’s new space in the web world. Let’s have a cup of tea to celebrate. If you ever start feeling nostalgic, you can visit the old site on the wayback machine.
