Portfolio 1.1

At the tail end of January this year I finally launched this website as my portfolio.

The original launch was a personal milestone, not only because I’d had this domain for 4 years prior to putting anything worthwhile online, but mostly because I learnt a lot.

I’d learnt to configured my own VPS with Linode, picked up nginx rather than Apache, discovered Symphony CMS over WordPress (for this project at least), tried my hand at responsive web design, and experimented with LESS on a live website.

Since then, I’ve found there were little details I just wasn’t happy with.

Version 1.1

Bits of the previous design were simply too loose with occasional artifacts of ideas I’d had and later rejected. The typography in blog posts was difficult to read at times too, which was worrying.

Additionally the CSS was, quite frankly, terrible. As I mentioned I was getting to grips with reponsive design as well as LESS, and this could all be done better.

Early evening on Friday I decided to start again.

I’d designed the January layout using in Fireworks. I had the ‘basic look’ of my design already, so this time I did everything in browser.

I’m now much more familiar with LESS. Built my own grid.less loosely based on semantic.gs, various LESS mixins for typography and structure, and it was all very painless.

I was able to redesign the entire website in an evening. The markup was already in place (with a few changes here and there), and I’ve become quite fond of Symphony CMS so no need to rebuild the CMS.

The final result in my opinion is much better.

What next?

I intend on writing some posts on what I’ve learnt over the last 3 months which led to the redesign, such as my better understand of LESS and responsive web design.

As before, there’s still stuff to do here. The responsiveness of the website is by no means perfect, in fact, its not finished.

The best time to start was last year. Failing that, today will do.
Chris Guillebeau

I’ve become a big believer of getting it shipped. Thats what I did in January, so this redesign was probably inevitable.

But this has meant at least I’ve had a portfolio online for 4 months, and it hasn’t been sat in my Dropbox unpublished as I’m too busy working on client projects.

Looking forward to the next re-design in August.