Current Portfolio Layout (as of February 12)
If you’re not the least bit interested in web design and development, you can probably skip this post. It’s basically going to be a jumping point for the redesign of my portfolio site (the main site on this domain).
So, it’s that time of the year again– the time where I start applying for jobs and spending hours writing cover letters and tweaking my resume (this may change too… more on that later). Although there are some interesting prospects on the horizon already, one major step for any multimedia student applying for jobs is to re-do or revamp their portfolio for submission. Last year, I was actually late (I re-did my site while I was employed at the time, not before getting the job), but it ended up not mattering too much for that job anyway. This year, if I want any sort of design or multimedia job which is actually relevant to my program, the renovation of my portfolio is of the utmost importance.
Now, web standards have been changing a LOT over the last few years. HTML5 finally appeared, jQuery has become commonplace, the CCS3 spec has been steadily advancing towards full cross-browser adoption, mobile internet devices have taken over the world, social media is everywhere. So what does this mean for my redesign? It means I have to finally change my method of working on websites. It was all nice and easy when most people had 1024×768 desktop or laptop computers on which they did most of their internet browsing. Nowadays, if your website takes longer than 2.1 seconds to load completely on an iPhone’s tiny display, you’re screwed (I made that number up, by the way). So, keeping this in mind, here are the problems with my current website:
1. Horizontal scrolling below 800px. This is especially annoying when I’ve “snapped” my window to the left or right on my Windows 7 laptop, and have to scroll sideways. For years, and perhaps even decades, one of the top rules of web design has always been- “never make your visitor scroll sideways!” Not only is it annoying, but the layout also breaks rather badly when one does scroll sideways. Whoops.
2. Plain. There’s no personality in the design, really. There’s plenty of personality in the content, because I tried for that deliberately, but for some reason, the design looks very uninspired. Mind you, it is quite nice and neat and clean, but it can be those without being bland.
3. No mobile optimization. This is a direct result of my not owning a smartphone, but that’s really no excuse. Now that it is fairly easy to customize one’s layout for mobile devices and netbooks, there’s no reason I can’t do that and save people a lot of scrolling on mobile devices.
4. Weird PHP page structure. I do try and minimize my URLs as much as possible, but they are neither memorable nor nicely linked.
5. Social media “dabbling”. I have links to my LinkedIn, Flickr, etc., but they are afterthoughts, not design features.
6. Layout disconnect between the main site and the blog (this site). They don’t even look like they belong to the same person.
7. No room for additional information about my bigger projects (or ones I am very proud of).
I’m sure there’s more, but this is what’s currently coming to mind. How am I going to fix these in the redesign? Like this:
- Main layout and navigation 650px or less (or whatever doesn’t make me scroll sideways when I’ve got my window “snapped”)
- Better design– more colour, better typography, no more Courier New as a body font– but still preserving the simplicity and clarity
- Mobile stylesheet(s)
- URL rewriting to make them shorter and memorable **I just tried this out on the existing site, and it worked! Excellent 
- Feeds from one or more social media sources (I’m thinking Flickr)– or at least, have them featured more prominently
- Redesign of the blog layout to match the portfolio layout
- “Featured Projects” section or area
This is what I’d like to accomplish. I know that given enough time, I can make it work– the key is, can I make it work given that I really don’t have much time at all? We’ll see.
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