Although more work remains to be done, DI is making progress on its site reconstruction, as you can see. Many of our navigation features are now functional and the site mostly “works.”
Tonight, “Alistair” of Solostream (the company that created WP-Vybe, the WordPress template I’m using) helped me figure out what I had been doing wrong, thereby enabling the artwork to pop into the header. That artwork really helped to jazz up the place, I’d say.
Based on my personal experience (and based on my review of the company’s support forum) Solostream is a terrific company that provides first rate support. They offer several “magazine” style templates for WordPress websites, and their prices are incredibly reasonable. Check out Solostream’s website for details and tutorials.
I’ll end with a bit of trivia: the “dangerous intersection” you can see in the header is a real-life intersection located at 8th and Cerre, downtown St. Louis, just south of the baseball stadium. 
Just for fun, I’m including a map containing a daytime satellite view of the intersection and the raw photo I’ve been using for the header (I took the image about three years ago). It’s not the world’s most dangerous intersection, but I took this photo late at night when it looked dangerous to me. 
More changes to the site are on the way, hopefully all of them good and hopefully no more crashes, which can happen when you stir 3rd party “plugin” into the site (these plugins are above and beyond the WordPress base and the Solostream enhancements).
If you have any comment or suggestion regarding design or navigation of the site, drop me a comment.
When I was a college student at Tennessee Technological University, there was a very similar 5-way intersection just off campus that the students called "Malfunction Junction".
A few months ago, i visited an old friend that lives near the campus, we drove to the campus so I could see how it had changed over the years. I noticed that Malfunction Junction had been replaced by a traffic circle. I am not a fan of traffic circles, but in this case it was an improvement.
I've read two books (Suburban Nation by Andres Duany and Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt) that claim the dangerous-looking intersections are much safer than regular intersections, because they demand a driver to be alert and careful. The traditional intersections have far more accidents, because they lend themselves to drivers' laziness.
Kind of poetic, don't you think? The daunting, scary topics that make many feeble minds shy away are the very topics that save us. It is the mundane, the lazy contentment that comes from the safe and predictable that spells our doom.
Erika: Great connections and, yes, poetic too.
That was exactly the idea I had when I started this blog: that we need to deal directly with the topics that seem "dangerous." It's much more dangerous to avoid the dangerous intersections. And if you have the courage to enter, you will naturally be inclined to enter with some care because they seem dangerous–and you'll likely emerge at least OK, and probably better off.
This town is renowned for its excess of 4-way stops. Three of the few 2-way stops left in my residential neighborhood when I moved in are now 4-way. These are at intersections between unarguably minor vs. unarguably primary streets.
Why? Because people have become so used to rolling through 4-way stops with no one waiting that they also roll right through the subordinate direction of 2-way stops. Then there is an oops, and someone tries to sue the city not protecting them from their own stupidity.
Personally, I would prefer removing stop signs and creating more intersections at which people actually have to stop to see if it is safe. I've read that where this has been tried, accidents decreased. Can anyone find this citation? I couldn't, on short notice.
Dan: Check out Erika's resources, 3 comments above. Also consider my earlier post on story about a Dutch traffic engineer who made a town safer by making the people feel unsafe (by removing lots of traffic signage).
http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/09/18/dange…
I am not a fan of the moving text. Anyone else as turned-off by it as me?
I also don't like this moving thing.