Construction Update

Some of you may have noticed I rebuild this place every few months, some of you will have noticed a lot of changes lately to this site, well I’m midway through a revamp of sorts!

Now that I’ve finished my dissertation, course works, I need to think about getting a job! So I need to get on with fixing up darkstars to show to employers, and I can’t do that with misaligned containers, and dodgy typography.

So to start off, I recently set-up a clone of my WordPress theme and started shifting the structure of my pages over to Blueprint. I’ve now inherited a new set of css layout and typography, and fixed all those issues with nested white boxes and semi translucent boxes and hyper link colours.

Once the transition was completed and some hiccups where fixed, I deployed the site and started work on more changes. Gone are the ‘I like this’ buttons and the almost working breadcrumbs! We use page impressions now to measure popularity, users won’t take the time to click a ‘like’ button, it’s easier for it all to be done automatically. For those who want to help share, I’ve put a box with buttons for Facebook Twitter and Google Buzz

In line commenting now works again, and I put in a jquery preview plugin! Alternate styling is back, with author posts being highlighted by a yellow band on the left.

Gone is the stamper link in the header, the menu is now cleaner, and it’s in the footer too. Blog posts are listed on the front page beneath the fold, and a lot of other pages have had subtle re-layouts.

Future Work

I’ll be doing more work to the front page. As it is, the site still doesn’t do enough to sell me as a potential employee. It also has a certain ‘grayness’ to it that could do with a splash of colour. I intend to do this with content so that the site itself doesn’t distract from the content.

I’m also moving the projects section under a new page called ‘My Work’, which will be magazine like in showcasing what I’ve done. The current page is too methodical and tree like.

One criticism I’ve had for a long time is:

“What’s your website for?”

I will put a rest to this question once and for all. My site is about my projects and me, and namely getting me work. My skills need to be put to use if I want cookies, so I’m going to makeit obvious using my front page. More updates as they come!