My Brand-Spanking New Website

I haven't updated my blog in around 5 months. Which doesn't really make it a blog anymore. Thanks to some motivation from a University assignment, I've had the chance to completely redo my site.

The main aim of this site isn’t to sell myself to clients (I have a job), but rather to be simple enough that it makes me feel like blogging. The only reason there is work on the front page is that I really had to do it for the assignment. If I had it my way, I might not have even had work on this site. But I think it helps give me some ‘cred’ so people can see that I sort of know what I’m doing. So that’s the focus of this new site - blogging. It’s not meant to be super flashy, or amaze you will cool transparent effects. The content is what is going to make it good.

A Little Over the Top for an Assignment

Like I said earlier, this site is technically for a university assignment. Meaning it is getting marked by my lovely, fantastic and over-whelmingly good-looking tutors (I hope you read that guys). Another little thing I put together was a little ‘pack’ to give to potential employers which all carry on the same brand. I think it turned out really nice. It’s just a mock-up of what would have been professionally produced by a printer, but the effect is still there, even if some of the folds and cuts are a bit dodgy.

I used a mini-cd rather than a full-sized one. This was my little spin on the assignment. It holds a business card, and a cd of work. Rather than going out to look for a mini-cd to buy, I just used an old GameCube game instead - Soul Calibur 2. I don’t think I’ll ever play that one again.

A Little Less Open

On the last site, I had many of my contact details, and just about every social network I belonged to available for anyone to go and add me. Sure, this sounded great at the time. Who doesn’t want more friends? But I found I was getting a few too many people, um, I’ll rephrase that, spam-companies, adding me all over the place. So this time I’ve opted to show a little less of myself.

You can send me an email via the contact page, and you can see my twitter, facebook, del.icio.us and flickr content. But that’s about it.

Dwindling Down to the Necessities

One thing I hate about lots of blogs is that they cram as much as possible onto it. Top Posts, Latest Comments, Del.icio.us links, twitter spam, blogroll, search, flickr, last.fm and more… all crammed onto the space of a single page.

All people really care about is the content of the blog, and by adding all that extra junk, they’re just trying to compensate for the lack of content. So you won’t find many ‘sidebar widget’ type things on this site. In fact, I’ve just taken the sidebar right out of there for the posts to focus on the content.

Projects Ahoy!

In an attempt to fuel my desire to create new and wonderful things, I’ve created a dedicated projects area. It’s a little under-designed at the moment, and I may give it a bit of a retouch later, but its there, and makes it make easier to people to find the things I make.

First Site Built Entirely with CSS Extra

CSS Extra is the TextMate bundle I’ve created, and this is the first full site I’ve been able to use its quick and easy layouts on. Doing this, I’ve discovered many bugs and annoying usability quirks that I’m going to try and fix up now. This site has proved to be of more benefit than I originally thought.

Find a Bug?

If you find something wrong with the site, let me know via email on my contact page, and I’ll try and fix it up. Much like Pokemon, you can never catch them all. Apart from that, let me know what you think of it. If you’ve got any suggestions, fire away.