Today, I launched a refreshed version of my personal website / portfolio. I’d like to tell you a bit about it.
Why redesign at all?
As my friend Shawn Blanc once said, “a man buys something for two reasons: a good reason and the real reason.” That was definitely the case with this redesign.
The good reason was that I needed a site to better showcase my growing portfolio to potential clients. On my old site, the portfolio was buried several pages deep. And even then, it only contained cropped screenshots of my work. Frankly, it was awful. This is much better.
But that wasn’t the real reason. In actuality, I was searching for a good reason to gut the site and rebuild it from the ground up. When I built the last version of the site, it was my first time ever working with Foundation 5. I hadn’t learned Sass yet, and I hadn’t built NationBuilder Foundation. As a result, the code was an absolute mess — making it very difficult to maintain — and I didn’t want to live (metaphorically) in a mess.
What changed?
In short: nearly everything. This new theme is still built on NationBuilder Foundation, but takes advantage of six months of improvements to the framework. I dramatically reworked the portfolio to be far more visual and browsable, and tried to make the rest of the site feel much lighter.
I kept the basic color scheme in place, but the new version has much more white space. I kept the type set in “Avenir Next,” which I love.
Credit where due
I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge folks who helped me on this project, which was a learning experience for me. So a special thanks to:
- My wife Christy, who patiently listened to me talk through more ideas and challenges than I can even keep track of. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this stuff if it weren’t for her.
- Naz Hamid and the folks at Weightshift, whose portfolio layout was the inspiration for my own. In particular, I studied their code to learn how to do that neat hover effect on the homepage. It’s very neat stuff.
- The folks at Wide Eye Creative, who designed Mary Burke’s campaign website. I spent the better part of an hour this afternoon trying to figure out how they selectively fixed the position of her sidebar. I’m glad to say that I’ve got it, now.
- My friend Klare Frank, who helped me debug a number of issues and gave feedback along the way. She’s a super skilled designer and front-end developer that quietly pushes me to do better work, and I appreciate it.
I think it’s important to rebuild your own site every six months or so, if only to have a safe place to test out new things. Not to mention that it’s tons of fun. I hope you like it.