Do you ever get the feeling of freshness when you hear the words “add it to my blog“? Well, I do. Being able to post whatever content you like on your blog without having to design it specificly, because you allready did that when first designing the blog. That’s what semantic markup means to me.
The eight version of my portfolio is done and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve really pushed myself to the limit regarding every single detail of this project, and it’s been a pleasant trip. Mostly.
…Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.
— Wikipedia on Semantic Web
This is the core of what I think is important on the web — Accessability. I, however, think that simplicity builds to finding content on a website.
I realized that I’ve been overlooking so many details with my previous designs, and I tried to see this as a normal project and really get the best out of it. I’m proud to say that I’m finally done.
Why redesign?
There’s so many answers to this that I don’t even know where to begin. First, the old portfolio section was a pain to add projects to. Now, it’s just as easy as posting an entry in the blog. Without actually doing it… Kinda.
Secondly, I wanted a real blog. Not just the latest-entry-thing that was harder to navigate than the IRS. These are the two main points, even though I was very tired of the design{1} and wanted to improve it while still keeping the same feeling of simplicity, minimalism and typography.
The changes
Every section has been updated and tweaked a bit. I wanted a tumblr-ish kind of blog, with various categories in it. But the most important thing was to go through the portfolio and make it more accessible and easier to look through. I am however not done with adding my past work, I’ll do that in due time.
I deleted much of the older work that no longer feels like what I’m doing today or even want to be doing in the future. It was simply too old and doesn’t represent my way of working today, even of some of them had kick-ass design.
Technology
I’m proud to say that I for the first time implemented CSS 3, so I recommend you to change to a modern browser{2} to fully enjoy these details and be up to par with future technology online.
Another thing I was trying out was the Custom fields{3} which I know I’m very late experiencing the benefits{4} of.
Other than that, it’s just handcrafted XHTML and CSS. Still using WordPress{5} and a list of plugins that I might share in the near future.
I’m going to post more in-depth blog posts about the tweaks and technology I’ve used to accomplish this. It’s nothing advanced and I’m sure everyone could pick up on this.
- I’m going to work them out before I’m releasing it as a theme. ↩
- I really can’t argue enough about how important this is, both for you as a visitor and web developers. ↩
- I used it successfully in one of my first attempts at rebuilding the portfolio, but that got changed as I started going through the work. ↩
- Every designer/developer/blogger using this CMS should read about it. It will help you somewhere in the pipeline. ↩
- Now using version 2.8, feels like I’ve been working on this forever. ↩
Love the new look. The body text seems too small though. Well, at least to my eyes.
But overall, it’s a nice redesign.
Thank you, Daus. Don’t know if I agree on the body text but I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks!
Font size looks fine to me. As I noted on Twitter – love it. I’m not sure I’d go with a serif typeface in the forms, though, seeing that nearly everything else is set in sans-serif.