THE BLOG
A Shiny First Blog Post
Whew! At last. After many months of procrastination I have finally gotten around to redesigning my website.
Mostly, it has taken me so long because I have been very busy with other work, but the bottom line is that I have found it very difficult to decide what my own site should look like. I now understand the pressure an architect must face when given the opportunity to design his or her own house. You want to showcase what you can do and have so many ideas but there must be a consistency and flow of design that can be overwhelmed by too many ‘bells and whistles’ making a site overblown and fussy.
As a ‘shop window’ for clients it should be impressive enough to persuade them that I can do ‘their job’ but not so ‘quirky’ that it puts me into too much of a niche!
In the end, I set myself the exact same questions as I do with any new client - who are your audience, what are the ‘calls to action’ that you want them to make, what types of information do you need to convey and what are the priorities for this this information?
I used the wonderful wireframing tool ‘Balsamiq’ to layout the information architecture before choosing any colours or design. Then, once the layout had been sorted I used Photoshop to create a site design, allowing me to begin setting specific layout spacing and font sizes. I had already designed my logo last year so had some colours and font ideas to begin the design.
Alongside Photoshop, I began to create the CSS layout (I use CSSEdit) and set the html layout bare bones. I used some Jquery to make some nice, slick slideshow features and finally, I transferred the html over to my Expression Engine templates and created the appropriate EE tags and weblogs.
I hope you like the final result but no doubt I will continue to tweak the design for ever!