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We’ve redesigned
05th April 2009
So I’ve finally managed to find the time to redesign this site. It’s been a long time coming with the previous design going live in April 2007 and it went down fairly well, so I felt a little more pressure this time around not to go backwards with the new one. Everyone whinges and complains about having to deal with clients, but I can assure you, designing for yourself is far worse. Since April 2007, I’ve torn through 7 different design concepts for this site. Some have been quite good, others not so much. We got there in the end though.
With the redesign I wanted to really get back to basics with the site and simplify things. I wanted to add more focus to my work to give visitors a better idea of what it is I do, as well as improve the blog side of things to (hopefully) encourage me to post a little more frequently then before. I’ll be the first to admit that this place has been pretty much left to rot over the last few months or so and really it’s all been down to the site becoming difficult to manage. I’ve come a long way since April 2007 both in terms of the quality of my design work as well as my working knowledge of ExpressionEngine, which is the content management system I use to run this baby. As time went on I became increasingly more frustrated with updating the old site, so when I started working on the new version of the site one of the main goals behind the redesign was to build a more robust website from both a design and technical standpoint.
Notes on the design
The general idea for the site, as I have said, was to keep things simple. I wanted to come up with a design that didn’t take people’s attention away from my work and the other information on my site. It’s all about the content. So design wise, I needed something that complemented the content and made the user’s experience of using the website as pleasant as possible. I also wanted to bear in mind that all of the site is completely dynamic, so I wanted a design that could scale and handle unpredictable amounts of text and imagery. I also wanted to have a little more variety in the layout throughout various pages, so it was important that I came up with a much more solid and robust grid system that would give me the flexibility and the option to add more layouts in the future. That’s more or less all there is to this design. A simple, easy on the eye design that works around the content of the site.
That’s not all
With a refreshed design sorted, various other areas of the site also needed some attention. The portfolio section of the site has been given a number of updates. This time around rather then just linking small, poor quality screenshots of my work directly to the client’s website, I serve up an (albeit brief) description of the client and the work I carried out. Along with these further details, I also decided it was time to start using slightly larger screenshots of my work and then of course provide the option to visit the website for those who want a better taste of what’s going on. Oh yeah, and there’s some new additions to the actual portfolio itself with some updated work for you to have a gander over. And trust me, there’s plenty more to come that I plan to blog about within the coming months.
As for the blog, well it’s no secret that this was completely and utterly abandoned towards the end of 2008 and the start of 2009, so this time around my aim was to come up with something a little easier for me to keep updated and frequently. Previously I rarely wrote articles for the site other then updates on what I’ve been up to, however I quite often posted up links to various sites I’ve stumbled across that I thought were of interest. With this in mind, I decided to combine the links and blog posts so that my external links would no longer sit on their own, hidden away in the sidebar. This time they share the same space as the blog posts themselves, with a slightly varied design to help distinguish the difference between links and articles.
I still have work to do to this section of the site over the next week. For a start, at the moment there is no way for you to access older content. So I still have to sort out some form of archives for this section, so first of all I will just get up some form of pagination going on and maybe a search for those interested enough in some of my older, mostly pointless, ramblings. So there is more to come from this section, so I guess for now the best thing you can do it subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss out. Talking of RSS feeds, I also need to incorporate the links into my RSS feed. In it’s current form, it only updates with blog posts so I will get this sorted in the coming days.
It’s not me, it’s you
I guess I owe IE6 a bit of a mention here too. I’ve spent the last month heavily considering whether or not to invest the time in supporting IE6, or whether to ditch it and focus on refining the design and trying to come up with something that I don’t feel was held back by an old, out of date, broken browser. A quick browse through my site statistics would tell me that only 4% of my visitors use IE6, so this alongside the fact that it’s my own personal website, resulted in me deciding to ditch IE6 almost completely. I did happen to spend a brief 30 seconds just to make sure users see something that’s not a complete eye sore, but other then that I guess I’m sorry IE6, but your just not cool enough to hang with me anymore. It’s not me, it’s you. For the record, if this was a website for a client, I would of course gone that extra mile to support IE6, but it’s my personal site and I’m happy that only 4% of users will see the bare bones version. This is the first time I’ve designed a website without fully supporting IE6 and I have to see, it feel liberated.
That’s all folks
That’s it for now. Feel free to have a browse and make sure you get in touch with your comments. I’ve turned off comments for now until I come up with a better solution for dealing with all the spam I get, but please don’t let this stop you from getting in touch with your thoughts.
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