It’s finally finished…

After contemplating starting a blog the past few years, and seriously working on the site the past 4 months, my site is finally ready to go. I've spent a lot of late nights trying to get this site up and I've missed several deadlines recently that I'd set for for myself. I put a lot of pressure on myself to create something that was good and at least somewhat unique, since I'd be the sole designer behind this site.

The previous two versions of my site were straight portfolio sites. Initially I struggled with whether to keep a portfolio section on my site or ditch it. I also considered creating separate sites for my interests in design, film, and music. I eventually realized that I'd never have the time to maintain three sites let alone get them all actually created. Once I settled on creating one site, I focused on visually how I wanted my site to look. The two words that I ended up focusing on were big and bold. One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of sites make today is using overly small fonts. Using small fonts was something that was necessary 10 years ago. Today we have larger monitors and higher resolutions, so designers can utilize larger font sizes to increase the readability on their site. With a blog site, I was able to use even larger font sizes than I would normally use on a client's site.

From there I started creating wireframes. I like to sketch out my initial thoughts with a pen and paper, rather than jumping right onto the computer. The homepage wireframes were by far the most difficult part of the entire site for me. There are so many different plugins and widgets available that can pull in your information from sites like Flickr, Twitter, etc. that it was difficult to narrow down what would be the most useful/interesting to people visiting my site. I mocked up approximately 20 different homepage variations before I settled on one what you see now.

The design phase actually came together very quickly. I used a very similar color palette to what I've used on the two previous versions of my site. The only difference was I substituted out yellow for a reddish-orange color.

From there I went into coding. This was another part that took much longer than expected. I tried to do some new things I hadn't attempted on client projects, and they ended up taking much longer than expected. Fortunately I ended up getting just about everything working in the end, with just a minimal amount of help needed from friends.

The hardest thing for me now will be consistently adding to the site. Writing isn't one of my strengths, but hopefully I'll be able to keep up with the it and it will improve over time. There are still a few things I'm tweaking and there will be a few more features added in the coming weeks, like a search function. If you come across any errors or have any questions let me know in the comments below.