It’s alive! And almost error free. I was never happy with the previous designs of this site, they seemed pasted together like a bad 80′s collage. So I set on the adventure to re-design my own site, something I hate doing because I always want to go in a thousand different directions.

The Design

I liked some things about the previous design like the color scheme(for now). But I didn’t like the background much, and it left me limited in what I could do. This time around I wanted a “cleaner” look, but not too clean. This proved to be harder than I thought, but eventually I combined two other designs into what you see now. I set out to freshen everything up and give it a good scrubbing and I’m happy with results(for now). I did sacrifice whitespace, almost all of it. I think I may need to address that in the future because I think the site looks somewhat “busy”(What do you think?).

The Layout

This new design uses almost the same grid as the previous designs, but now it actually sticks to it throughout the site. I’ve got some plans for the future and I wanted(needed) a strong grid and to actually stick to it this time. The homepage is now something I’m happy with, it meets all my goals, and I will be able to update the top with my latest projects. The site in whole is much more structured and hopefully easier to navigate now.

The Portfolio

This site used to be my portfolio, but when I started blogging a trashed it. Since then it felt like this site had a bit of an identity crisis. It wasn’t a really just a blog, but wasn’t a portfolio either. I feel I’ve integrated by business and the blog much nicer now. I wanted a flashy portfolio, but simple and effective at the same time. I decided to use some AJAX for it, mainly because I wanted to experiment. The result is a cool portfolio…that barely works at the moment. I’m still working on the kinks and usability issues(like bookmarking) so if you spot any errors(or better ways of doing it) please let me know. It is also pretty sparse over there as I haven’t really uploaded much to it yet.

Cleanup

I still haven’t done my ritual of going through the code and cleaning it all up and making it pretty so the backend is not optimized at this time. In fact the code for this website looks like a monkey grabbed my keyboard. But it works, which is the most important part, unless you are a one of those people that reads the code to see how un-semantic sites are. If you are one of those people(I read web-pages in pure HTML), you might have a heart attack looking at the code right now(give me a week, for your health’s sake). The javascript also will need some attention at some point, but that will likely happen when jQuery 1.5 is released.