I finally have a design

After looking at my ideas and designs in the seminar group, the people in the group thought I had some good ideas. But after leaving the meeting and getting home I decided it was time to start again.

I spent the next few days looking on the net at various portfolio web sites and trying to come up with some ideas for my own site. I tried quite a few different designs none of which I was happy with. I spent quite some time on it and came up with an initial home page design I was happy with.

I sent my proposed design to a couple of people in my group and asked them for their honest opinion. The feedback I received was that they both really liked the idea and suggested a few things that I could do to improve it.

I spent the next few days implementing these changes and designing the rest of the pages until I was completely happy with the outcome.

I made the decision that I was going to use WordPress as a content management system for the site and try and use new HTML 5 and CSS 3 features wherever possible.

Hopefully with the design and the technology I’ll be using I will be able to create a portfolio that I’m proud of.

Designing for yourself is hard

After doing a competitive analysis last week it was time to start designing my own portfolio. Initially I thought this would be really easy and was quite excited about designing a portfolio to show off all my work.

I started by looking on the net at various portfolios and gathering ideas for what I would like on my site and what kind of things other people have included. It was at this point it dawned on me that this task was going to be much harder than I thought.

A lot of the portfolio sites I saw I didn’t like and a lot of the ideas that I thought where original turned out to have been done hundreds of times already. I wanted my portfolio site to be original and have some ideas that people would look at and think wow I like that, but so far I’ve struggled to come up with any ideas that are going to give the wow factor.

I looked at well over a hundred different portfolios and still had no idea of what I would like mine to look like. Even now I’m not 100% on how I want my web site to look. But regardless I did some initial wire frames of different ideas of how I thought I’d like it to look. I’ve experimented with these initial Ideas but so far haven’t got one in my mind that I’m dead set on using.

Tomorrow I have a seminar group however to show my ideas where individuals can comment and offer constructive feedback. I’m hoping after doing this I’ll have a clearer idea of exactly what I want the site to look like.