My new site is officially open for business. Okay, technically, I uploaded a week ago before I was really done. Shame on me. Your comments are welcome and I’d love to hear your feedback (the good, the bad and the ugly) on the new site.
Getting Down to Business
Building your own site is hard. Without any client direction, you can easily sidetrack yourself with competing ideas. I went through about 4 different possible designs and settled on something I never would have expected. Normally, I like light designs. This is dark with reverse type and very unusual for my tastes. Below are two examples of headers that didn’t make the cut.
The original header was fun to make, but just didn't seem to make sense for what I was trying to do.
This header concept stuck but the menu had to go with too much resemblance to the circus.
Platform
I exclusively use WordPress these days and this site is no exception. I love the WP community and its eagerness to help. I learn something new and useful on every project and this was no different.
I started with the default theme (WP 2.9.2) and built from there. I’ve detailed the plugins I used in the next post.
What I Like
- Portfolio page. I wanted simple and accessible for the portfolio so I decided to feature one item per page. I was able to accomplish this by using a cool jQuery plugin that allows the posts to work on a slider where only one is visible at a time. Viewing additional work is as easy as clicking (and sliding) to another project. The page itself is a customized category template that makes use of custom fields as well as the post and title. Each time I add a new project, I simply fill out the fields on a new post and just like that, it slides in to the portfolio rotation.
- The menu. As I showed above, the first menu was kind of circusy (not really a word). I decided it needed to be more understated but with a pop. Enter more jQuery that allows the hover effect to ease in rather than happen immediately. As you hover over, the light grows at a slow place and then sticks once you go to that page (yes, there is a flicker and I haven’t figured that out yet). Check out this tutorial to see how it’s done.
What I’m Looking to Build On
I doubt I’m alone when I say there are 100 things I don’t like for every one I do. It’s hard to look at your own site and not fret over every bit of minutia. With that said, here are a few things on the list for improvement.
- Code efficiency. I’m new to jquery and trying to pick it up. As such, I relied heavily on plugins and tutorials and left some bloated code.
- Simpler home page. Not sure I love the home page anymore. It might be busier than I wanted and I may work to improve its visual presentation.
- Blog design needs some TLC. I kind of went bare bones on the blog implementation for now in the name of getting it up and running. I’ll spend time off and on improving it. For example, the comments template, other than a bit of CSS, is pretty much out of the box from the default theme.
- The little things. A misalignment here, malfunctioning feature there, sprinkle in a few browser issues and top it off with a few unsolved bugs and you have yourself a long to-do list.
Browser support
IE6 will surely die and the clock is counting down.
All major browsers are supported. Yes ,even you Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Actually, 8 isn’t too big of a challenge. It still has hiccups but was pretty consistent throughout development. IE7 on the other hand was a pain, as it always is. And as for IE6, well, it’s far from a “major” browser and I chose not to support it. As far as the rest of the browsers go, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari are all in working order. There is a bug with Safari right now, however, that is at times preventing the Recent Work sidebar from loading.
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