I haven’t had a personal site in over three years, yet I still call myself a *gasp* web designer. The problem I’ve run into is that after working a full 8 to 10 hour day on other people’s designs and code, I’m not particularly keen on coming home to stare at my screen and work on one of my own. With all of the new technologies a web designer / interface designer / user interaction designer / (insert your title here) has to keep up with, there’s a certain bent appeal in adding all of these nifty tricks to your site, but even deeper than that is the big question I always had a bit of difficulty answering: What do I want my site to actually do?
Previous incarnations of my site, which carried a variety of different monikers, really served as more of testing ground for me to try out all sorts of neat new HTML and CSS tricks that I learned. Now that I’m fluent and know most of the !important¹ stuff, I don’t really require a website to show off new things to my mildly interested friends, I need an actual purpose.
That, for me, is the most difficult part. A lot of my favorite sites and writers have very specific purposes and serve them well. My taste in most things is so varied I was finding it difficult to wrangle my ideas down to one or two key items. After flipping through a great book my girlfriend got me for Christmas, I was able to effectively streamline my ideas. I started broad at first and will work my way down. My site flow chart looks something like this:
- Homepage – blog of semi-personal and work-related things, featured works possible
- Blog / Archives – more in-depth listing of all blogs
- Portfolio
- Web Portfolio
- Video work
- Photography
- About – a short blurb about me and what I do. Resume also possible
- Contact – a form that will allow users to get in touch with me via email about website-related issues or about starting work for them
For a while I was trying to fit in some useful content (beyond the blogs) that would allow me to teach some of my methods and concepts in the form of screencasts. I wracked my brain and severely overcomplicated the solution, which is something I have a tendency to do when designing. I then took a step back, looked at some CSS galleries and discovered that the easiest way is usually the best and, viola!, tutorials will simply be a category of the blog. This simple solution incorporates the tutorials into the content and makes singling them out for searching as easy as clicking on the category name (or actually searching).
With all of this said, I’ve officially put my foot down on the latest design. This means, for the better or worse, that I’m going forward with what I’ve done and hope that it will grace the pages of so many of the CSS galleries that have helped me through my existential (web) crisis.
¹ – Kudos to anyone who got this joke.
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