Portfolio and Blog Redesign

I started the first of, hopefully, many 24 hour projects just 22 hours ago, and my god it has been an intense 22 hours indeed. I fear I may have cheated a bit (I had the idea for this blog last week) but honestly, I couldn’t live with that default WordPress theme any longer.

The redesign was driven by the idea that this blog will document my thoughts throughout the year and, possibly, years to come. The main form of this being a 24 hour project for each week in the year. More than anything the content here is about learning through doing, the idea being: the more work you do, the better you get. That means quantity is one of the major aspects behind the project as a whole.

I also wanted one place that I could post everything to. My online presence has spread out over time and no longer can I afford the time to keep all of these places up to date. I wanted to be able to add work to my portfolio from the same back-end that allowed me to document these projects, or let me post pictures that I’ve taken.

With so many different types of content going into the same website the design had to be simple in terms of Aesthetics, but also structure. Consistency was important here, the content should define the sections of the site, not layout.

Of course, when content is presented in such a raw form it can make a website seem a little void of humanity and identity. Stuck, I went to twitter, and I’m so glad I did. Twitter lets their users upload a little avatar to go next to their tweets. It’s such a simple thing, but it makes such a difference. Your tweets are tied to you, visually. You recognise who the tweet is from instantly. That’s why it throws you so much when people change their avatars to something completely different, or two avatars look very similar. Not only would this put a name to a face, but I had the perfect one already, one I had been using for almost a year, one that was already ingrained into my followers’ brains.

The development of the theme itself was fairly straight foward. It’s based on Elliot Jay Stocks’ Starkers theme for WordPress, which is truly fantastic and saved me potential hours when it came to the comment form template (that thing is scary). I hope you’ll forgive me with the state of the CSS, when you’re pushed for time you begin to stop grouping and commenting things. The site is not finished (that’s the great thing about the web) and I’ll continue to update the code and make improvements over time.