For those inclined to know lots of details about obviously insignificant things, here's some more info. The new design took several months to figure out, working at it for only a couple of hours per week. It took several attempts to come up with the general idea of the new design, and then many hours adding all the little details. I won't terrorize you with the early versions of the design, they still give me nightmares ;)

Design work was done using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Most items are custom drawn, although I've also bought the rights of various vector images on iStockPhoto. There is really no point spending a lot of time drawing something if someone has already drawn a perfectly good version of it for a fair price. I stuck with the overall color scheme I used for the old page, which is based on the 800 series Kyushu shinkansen.

Not being the biggest WYSIWYG editor fan, programming was done using TextMate. Initially the main design was converted to clean XHTML and CSS. From there bits and pieces were transferred to Drupal template files. At the time of writing, the page uses about 30-35 custom template files.

The CMS used is, as already mentioned, Drupal. The reason I went for Drupal is that it is a small core system, with many thousands of modules to add new functionality. Drupal is also under very active development and has a massive, active community. It took a while to set up, and there is a bit of a learning curve because the CMS does things a bit different than many others, but once you get the hang of it, it works great.

JR-Chiisai is running Drupal 6 with around 40 additional modules installed. Many of them are small modules to make things a bit easier both for myself and visitors. Some of the larger, and according to many people essential modules make sure the design is possible to implement, block spam and generally make the site possible.

Content is slightly lacking, but it will be added regularly. I wanted to get the page up before adding all the content on a local install. You never know what might go wrong ;)

Obviously, the site has been fairly regularly tested on various browsers and platforms. That said, there is a good chance some things don't look right, or downright don't work. In that case, please either comment on this post, or drop me an email.

Lastly, for the history buffs around you, here's an image of what the old page looked like:

The old JR-Chiisai