About Ardamis

Ardamis.com is a tiny web design studio specializing in high-quality, handmade web sites. All of our projects are designed with an emphasis on valid, standards-compliant code. If you are interested in a site with clean, elegant code and naturally high search engine rankings, please drop us a line.

We are also pleased to offer a web site audit service that evaluates your existing site for more than a dozen SEO best practices. We will show you how the search engines see your site and provide white-hat recommendations for ways to improve your organic rankings.

Colophon

Sunday, 20 January 2008

Ardamis.com is Oliver Baty. The studio is located in Oak Park, Illinois.

I’ve been interested in web design since the late 1990s, when the web was a pretty ugly place. My first sites had a very minimalist, monochromatic tilt to them, in reaction to the both the blocky, chunky, 256 color commercial sites and the ubiquitous, blinking text and animated gif-bedazzled Geocites personal pages. From the beginning, I focused on writing clean, logical and legible code that performed well.

More recently, I’ve become a humble student of organic SEO. Thankfully, the very practices that result in quality pages for human visitors also help with the search engines. Simple, straight-forward, standards-compliant web sites that are good for people are good for Google.

This web site uses WordPress for content management. The layout draws from a number of sources, but I must mention that John Gruber’s site, DaringFireball, has been a huge influence. Every time I think I’m approaching minimalist zen, I revisit his site to see what else I can strip out of mine. Another excellent example of text-as-geometry is Warpspire’s Hemingway theme, which I’ve also drawn quite a bit from. Ardamis.com is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (served as text/html for the time being) and valid CSS. You can check the links in the footer of each page if you’re curious about validation. The font in the header graphic is BN 3rd Place (variously, BN 3th Place).

The name Ardamis comes from a misheard song lyric on the 1984 Planet P Project album "Pink World." It’s a pretentious art rock album that shamelessly rips off Pink Floyd, but at the time it sounded pretty good. And I was 10.

The site also uses the following plugins:

Code Auto Escape — Automatically escape code within <code> … </code> tags.
Head META Description — Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tag line for everything else.
the_excerpt Reloaded — When a post does not contain an excerpt, displays the contents of the post (typically abbreviated), which can be customized to selectively allow HTML tags, specify the length of the excerpt (in words), refashion the “more…” link, etc.
Other Posts From Cat — At the bottom of every post, links are shown for the last X posts from the current category.
Google Sitemaps — This generator will create a Google compliant site map of your WordPress blog.
A WordPress Plugin for Adding the Post Date to wp_get_archives — It’s just like wp_get_archives(’type=postbypost’);, but it also shows the date of the post. (Written by me.)
Despacer WordPress Plugin — Removes the leading spaces from wp_title();, useful if you’ve put the page title ahead of the blog title. (Written by me.)
Xbox 360 Gamercard WordPress Plugin — Display your Gamer Card using XHTML and CSS instead of an image or an iframe; style it however you like. (Written by me.)
Halo 3 Service Record WordPress Plugin — Display your Halo 3 Service Record information using XHTML and CSS instead of an image or an iframe; style it however you like. (Written by me.)
Halo 2 Stats WordPress Plugin — Similar to the Halo 3 plugin, but for Halo 2. (Written by me.)

Progress

Grimace-inducing yearbook photos

Although I’m not ready to laugh about it yet, yes, I did look like this once. You remember how it was, everyone was wearing short shorts and striped socks in those days.