Things here are still being worked out. I've never had a personal site before, and naturally, rather than getting hooked into Blogger, Wordpress, etc., I decided to learn HTML, CSS, Expression Engine, and a little bit of server-side scripting to roll my own. I ended up liking it enough that I'd like to pursue the creation of hypertext professionally.
One thing that truly amazed me is the difficulty of a personal site, compared with some of the other sites I've worked on. I was aghast at how little I know about myself and how difficult it is to make decisions based on one's own personality. I tried brainstorming, doodling, mood boards, and about everything I could think of. I still don't feel like I came up with a site that accurately portrays either how I view myself or how I would like to be viewed. One thing I'm incredibly grateful for through this entire process is the rabbit hole I've been taken down in understanding who I am and what that means through this site. Hopefully version two will present that more clearly.
For now, I thought I'd archive some notes on the design.
How I Got This Far
I think some inspiration here would be duly noted. Although the thanks page is also a good place to check out. For various reasons, this site looks almost nothing like any of the sites I'm about to list:
What I particularly like
I'm pretty pleased with how the texturing came out and the small patch I was able to use and get a decent effect repeating using CSS. Structurally, I think I've also pretty much nailed things down exactly how I want them. I'd like to explain a few of the decisions I made in that regard.
[Page Name].joshuacody.net. I think this is the simplest URL structure. When telling someone something, it's much easier to say "blank dot blank dot net" than "blank dot net backslash blank." I would, however, like to publicly tirade the squatter at joshuacody.com for messing up my user experience.
The things I love. I've always known I'd like to include this. I'm fascinated in interviews centering around the things people love and use, and it's why I'm eagerly awaiting bbbbrands.com. I develop extreme loyalty to the things I own that treat me well, and I feel like I'd love to share that with you. I'm particularly pleased with the way this section turned out.
The footer. For quite awhile, I struggled over what to put in here. I think this came to be a perfect balance as I now have a contact form on every single page, easy navigation and some other places you can find me on the web. There isn't anything else I wish was in there, and there isn't anything I feel shouldn't be there. I didn't want to embed my Flickr stream or Twitter posts on the site, because if you wanted to be regularly updated on those, you would likely be visiting them individually, not here.
The blog as home. Content is king. I truly and honestly believe this. Design exists to make content a pleasure and help an individual or organization tell their stories. I'm glad it takes zero clicks to get to the meat of my content, and there is minimal distraction between the top of the page and the content. This will become even more evident in redesigns.
Expression Engine. Love it. Enough said.
The things you might be wondering about
Where are the comments? I don't think blog comments are helpful. If you'd like to make your opinion known to all, I'd like to encourage you to write a thoughtful, detailed summary and post it to a location of your choosing. If you'd like to make your opinion known to me, I'd like to encourage you to write a thoughtful, detailed summary and send it through the contact form. When reading an entry, you are choosing to consume the content. After you consume the content, you have some more options: * Forget it. * Consider it, and internalize it for the sake of later use. * Consider it, and disagree with it. * Consider it, and pass it on. I don't believe giving you the option to comment on a post is actually helpful. But should you post a thoughtful response elsewhere or send me a thoughtful response with permission to reprint, I will make it a point to update entries.
The navigation is in a strange place. This was a decision I struggled through. I wanted as little as possible between the top of the page and the content. I decided to use the .localscroll jquery plugin to get you from "and more" to the navigation. Even what I have now is a bit much for me, and I hope for version two of the site to adequately address this problem and leave the least possible clutter between page-top and content-top.
Some Problems
It's certainly not perfect. I've actually been fiddling with this for probably seven months now, and I just had to get something out the door. I had to convince myself I could go to production, even if it's something I'm not 100% satisfied with. I hope to be and always remain my greatest critic, and I'm on a great start to that here.
The copy. This goes back to my previous struggles over understanding me. Do I want to be self-aggrandizing? Self-deprecating? Playful? Exciting? This is a personal branding issue—excuse me, had to get the bile out of my mouth after seriously referring to "personal branding"—that is bound to send me to the looney bin before I come up with a good answer to it. I feel I need some sort of personality test or an interview from someone who is not me in order to figure this out. I get into ridiculous internal dialogues involving words like actuality, reality, pastiche, and simulacrum, then I find myself disappearing from photographs.
The colors. Black, brown and bland all over. That will change later.
The type. I'm not satisfied with my choice of Lucida Grande/Sans Unicode. I haven't thoroughly tested it, but I don't think it's the best cross-browser, cross-platform experience, and I think it's more suited to a technology blog than this humble amalgamation I have here. It also does not work well with the use of Clarendon in the header and footer titles. Again, this will be fixed later.
The Future
Version two is already in the works, even before version one is done. A radical stylistic departure from the current version is to be expected. It kind of pisses me off knowing that version one is out in the wild like this, an experiment gone wrong. But hey, that's life. Public design is awkwardly and unexpectedly vulnerable.
