NEW PORTFOLIO WEBSITE

Published: 04 Jun 2014

  Tags: Website

God, it's about time you got a new website Ben

I could hear you all thinking it... Well maybe not, but there comes a time when you should really but some work into your own professional personality and that time was long over due.

Here is what my old site used to look like:

So it's not terrible but nor is it fun, responsive, or massively dynamic.

The dawn of the new site

The new website combines a new CMS I've been using since 2012 called Processwire which I simply swear by these days. Why? It's PHP based, so easy to jump in; it's got a great community; it's built taking prompts from API design and Jquery so pretty much anything can be made with it and extended from the basic install.

Site structure

This was a hard one, given I wanted to display the various things I do but without completely putting off people who simply want to hire me to design a website. I opted to filter links to different projects, as well as enabling different viewing styles thourgh the layout toggle buttons. Hopefully people will be able to find interesting aspects of my work quickly (this will be tested after the site has been live for a bit) and have a general overview of the other types of projects I'm interested and feed into my work.

JS and CSS

I pride myself in my frontend and design so I try and do custom js and css where possible. However, I did use Mixup.js for the Portfolio and Articles pages, as well as a lightbox plugin for gallery images. I have started displaying smaller projects or creative endeavours as banners that are randomly choosen for teh main pages. For example one banner is a slideshow created without any plugins; similarly there is a html5 canvas blocks banner where random pixel looking squares are created access the banner and change on a ever slowing timer.

As I have more time to work on these projects in the future I hope to add them as banners with links to the projects themselves (usually on github).

The new site also makes use of various new browser technologies like ajax, history, css3 animations / transitions and localStorage

Feedback

Thank you for everyone who has spent time to feedback to me on this site. It's still a working progress as most sites are, but your comments have all been valueable to making this reasonable stable first version.