I’ve lost track at this point of how many times I’ve redesigned my personal homepage over the years.
Each time I started with the same idea. Make somewhere that people can find me on the web, a place to share highlights of my work, with a way for me to write about whatever I’m thinking on at that time. The cycle begins, a wave of motivation comes over me and I start.
In the late 90’s, my homepages were full of animated GIFs and status tickers, written in HTML and inline styling. Permanently .under construction’.
In the 00’s, they contained a lot of flash video and interactive content. Form over function and complete overkill.
In the 10’s, they were slick, minimal and feature rich, using HTML5 and CSS3, sometimes jQuery.
They were all fun to work on, but they were never finished. I never completed them because I spent too much time on the design and layout, or the technology. Ending up with some bloated mess and a vague promise to return and finish it someday. To compound this, they were always visually based on some ‘trend’ happening in design at the time and usually didn’t stay very fresh looking for long.
For this iteration of my site, I started with the content I wanted to showcase (portfolio stuff and some written work), and chose WordPress with a basic (free) template I found online. It’s not flashy, doesn’t use the latest bleeding edge tech, feel particularly snappy or look like any current trend. The navigation isn’t exactly how I’d like it, or the experience all that well optimised for different screen sizes…but it’s finished and so it makes way for my content to be front and centre. I can focus on fleshing out my portfolio now, and writing.. the things I wanted to do in the first place.
