24th September 2010
Fresh design for belitsky.info
I just finished working on a new design for my personal site.
The previous design was nice, and I still like it, but it has been lacking some important things:
- It was not as readable as I wanted it to be. The text and content was not the focus of the design. Now it is.
- There was no obvious structure and content organisation.
- It lacked a showcase of my work, potentially leaving future clients unsatisfied (I had to prepare a list of projects every time I would communicate with a prospective clients).
- It was missing something meaningful to me: my photos.
- It contained no client testimonials.
- It was a Jekyll based site, so it needed HTML editing and exporting every time. There was a time when I didn’t mind this, but times have changed. I like to manage things in a simple way, in a simple content editor. While Jekyll is great, I now prefer the easy to use backend and content organisation features offered by WordPress.
Upon understanding all of these cons I began working on new a design. I like: simple, readable and easy to navigate. So i prepared a typographic grid and made templates for each page based on this grid. The results were pleasant. It was light and simple and content oriented design. Some of features added to the new site:
- My site should demonstrate my skills to potential employers and be the place to communicate with like minded people around the world. Now it has section for Blog and section for Projects.
- It is easy to maintain: utilizing WordPress with custom post types for Projects, Photos and Testimonials (no need to use third party plugins for such functionality – thanks WP!) And it’s easy for me to work from any place or computer I choose as I can manage everything on the site through my browser via the WordPress admin system.
- I used comments from my old site – powered by Disqus. It was easy to move it to the new site.
- You can comment my photos. Don’t hesitate to do so.
These changes matter. The old site needed much improving. New ideas were brought into my head, forcing me to update the site. Here it, new and fresh – hope you’re enjoying it.
If you are interested in the old design and Jekyll templates, you can still get them on github.
Please chime in if you have something to say: what you think about this update? What do you want to see here in future? Thanks for your attention and I hope to talk with you soon.