Welcome to my first blog post, it will be a journey through the different web designs and ideas I tried before getting to the portfolio you see here today. It has been a struggle but I’m finally at a point where I am happy with this personal project.
How it all began
I originally began working on my portfolio straight out of university as a way of showcasing my work to hopeful employers, for the first few interviews I had I only took print outs of my work and I was given the same advice from many of these opportunities, to create an online portfolio of my work.
So I started… and then I stopped as I was offered my first role with an exhibition stand contractor called 3 Sixty Displays (you can see the website I designed and built for them here) and all my design and development time went into this. Once I finished there I got a job at npower, It was here that I learned everything I know about design and development (guys at npower will be laughing I’m sure). As I was working as part of a front end web team I met other people in a similar position to me, wanting a portfolio, so we set ourselves a challenge to design and build one by a certain date, it seemed like a good idea to push ourselves into doing something, it worked with me, not so much with my colleague (you know who you are Rob).
What went ‘Live’
I have had a couple of portfolio designs go ‘Live’ over the years but have always wanted to change them as I’ve never been happy with them, all designed and built as part of colleague challenges (I wonder if I need a competitive element to my work, suppose that’s another blog post altogether). Don’t know what I was thinking really with the first live design below other than I wanted a ‘one pager’, and then I decided to hide the work I had done for no apparent reason. I also seem to have an obsession with putting stupid pictures of myself on my portfolio.
The second design was my attempt at something ‘wacky’ and hopefully a bit different (yes, the Captain America in the corner is me), I continued the one page website theme as I never got round to building the about or contact sections that you can see in the navigation. At least this design allowed people to see what I had worked on and read what I had contributed to the project.
What I found difficult
I wont lie, I find web designing very difficult. I feel sorry for some of the designers I have worked with over the years, design is so subjective. Sometimes it seems nothing they do is ever right for the client/owner etc and this is the problem I had with my portfolio, with the client being myself.
Choosing a theme or design style for my website wasn’t too difficult as I really like minimalism and in all honesty I think its a lot easier to design a minimalist website than say a retro or grunge style.
I had problems choosing a color palette towards the beginning as I wanted a dark minimalist design rather than white, but I just couldn’t seem to get a good combination of colors together. It was a suggestion by my girlfriend that I just use orange (her favourite color) and only orange, while I didn’t take the suggestion too seriously it did push me into using the color in the design, I think it creates a great contrast with the white and dark grey (one of my favourite colors).
What I enjoyed
I always enjoy coding my XHTML and CSS, especially when working on a personal project as it allows you to try different things that you may not normally be able to do due to time constraints, system issues, having to work without dated technologies etc. I also liked how at this point I have worked on enough other projects and websites (Spanish Country Cottages and Turia Valley for example) that I can showcase work other than npower which I couldn’t do a few years ago as that’s all I had.
The result.
And here it is, the final design, I still don’t think its perfect and there will be slight alterations to it over time but for the first time I’m actually happy with the result. What made me even happier was when I showed it to a few guys at work they asked who I got to design it for me, I’ll take the compliment lol.
Look out for my next blog post which will go into more detail on my final website design.
About Ben
Hi My name is Ben and i am a front end web developer based in the Midlands of England. I love all things HTML and CSS with over 5 years commercial experience but on the side i also enjoying smashing my body to pieces down the gym and playing football.
3 Responses to From that to this.
The images used in this post were also taken from my old blog layout and look so don’t fit quite right in the new look and feel
This post will need to be updated as i have redesigned my website… again.
I wonder how long my latest design will last.