Building a personal site in the blog format has many obvious advantages. It’s fast to build, easy to manage, flexible and expandible. If you are using open source content management systems (CMS) such as Wordpress (Blog) or PhpBB (Forum), there are big communities out there that generate enormous amount of resources that allow site owners to choose specific feature sets and implement them quick.

The build-from-scratch approach simply seems a lot less attractive now. If I have enough control over customization, there is almost no reason not to go with this time-saving route, even it means I have to live with a fixed content / presentation structure.

There was a time I thought building a Flash wrapper is more interesting than the actual content. This site could have looked like this:

Chi Hsiao (shao) is an user experience designer and a web producer with over 10 years of experience in web usability and interaction design.  Holding a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunication Program with a background in fine art and a project management certification (PMI), his professional experience ranges from interaction design and information architecture, visual and art direction, rich media digital publishing, RIAs to online gaming and social media technologies.

Chi spent most of his career in the New York City and the San Francisco Bay Areas and is currently a Senior User Experience Designer at BroadOn Communications Corp. focusing on next-generation gaming platform and TV-based interaction design. SignOnSign.net is his personal blog covering topics such as web development and technology trends, user experience design, entrepreneurship, art, culture and music, as well as selected works throughout his career since 2000.