Once again, It was time for a complete re-design of my website.
After a few frustrating iterations, my previous design was just something created to be as simple as possible so I didn’t screw anything up. White background, black text, lots of pictures. It worked out pretty well, but it didn’t exactly sell me as a web designer (to be fair this one isn’t very web-designer-ish either). It was also a little cold and unfriendly. It also had some formal issues, such as wide text columns.
This new site fixes these issues, and is also generally more visually interesting.
![p9_screenshot p9_screenshot](http://www.anthonymattox.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/p9_screenshot-450x236.gif)
The Blog layout stayed more or less the same. The post meta-data is in the left column followed by the main column for the post content. A third column, on the right hand side, can be used to annotate images and other elements within a post. I’ve also added a fancy tag cloud and page numbers thanks to a nifty plugin. I’ve been struggling between having a wide column with nice big images, and a thinner, easier to read, column, with smaller images. To try and get the best of both, I added Thickbox (sorry Lokesh, I was already using jQuery).
I feel my work is much more effective when it is larger and I had to sacrifice larger images in my blog for the sake of the layout. Thickbox helped this some, but just to make sure, I added the option to add a custom background to every blog post and page. Someone with a larger screen looking at on of my projects will see an elegant column of images, but will also have it filling in the background around the page. To enhance this I also have custom highlight colors to match the background image. Any page that shows multiple posts pulls these custom options from the top post.
The Home Page has grown substantially. A work from my portfolio is still featured at the top and it’s background pulled. I’ve also added more links to other parts of my site and around the web, and a silly picture of me, just for fun.
My Portfolio now has three viewing modes (large images, excerpts, and thumbnails) and benefited from other site wide additions.
As of right now I still have some little tweaks to make, but everything seems to be pretty much in place. I hope to get some feedback from everyone on the new page look. Comment below, or try my fancy new contact form.
Post Page »