One thing I’ve noticed is that many designers and developers often neglect their own personal sites… there just never seems time to work on it and paid work has to come first!
I’m a perfect case of this – having worked away for years building sites for others using Wonderflux.
Finally I’ve got round to creating a new theme – the first to be built using Wonderflux version 2 with shiny new responsive grid system called Flux Layout, whoot!) This has given me a great opportunity to test and refine it before I get it ready for release – demo layouts can only take you so far!
A new responsive, retina optimised layout
My last re-design of this site was nearly 6 years ago and things move fast in this industry! Although I’ve been using many of the technologies I’ve deployed on this site in my client work, I thought it was about time to actually use some of this on my own personal website.
During the last re-design, the absolute hottest topic was accessibility and producing valid mark-up. These things are of-course still highly relevant, but on-top of this it’s all about ‘responsive’ design today – site layouts that adapt to different screen sizes such as tablets and mobile phones.
Another big structural change is using multiple WordPress post types and taxonomies. Each ‘type’ of content now has it’s own specific admin controls built to suit it’s particular purpose. Combined with deployment of custom field controls it should afford me a-lot more flexibility in the future (especially when it comes to re-design the site again in the future) – I now have a content management system that is built to purpose using best practice WordPress technologies.
Finally, I’ve deployed a-lot of vector format graphics and high resolution images (my logo is an SVG and I’m using an ‘icon font’) – which all look beautiful on high DPI/Retina screens such as my current laptop (Mac Book Pro Retina) and iPhone – look mum, no pixels (unless you look really, really closely of-course…they are just really tiny basically!)
Still a work in progress…
In it’s current state, this site is some way off being finished (hope you haven’t noticed!) – it still needs some tidying here and there and is missing re-deployment of my portfolio section amongst other things. I also need to optimise the code some-what to squeeze every last byte out of it (although it’s already performing quite well in it’s current state!).
One other task is to edit/adapt some of the old content to suit the new format and structure. However, I’ve taken the approach of launching it early and developing it as I have time, rather than work on it for ages in private on my local development server.
I’m going to make a commitment to writing more blog posts in 2015 – something that I have sadly neglected. Also, after being asked at various conferences about where to access some of the tips I share during presentations, I have also opened up a new tips section that I’ll be posting useful bits and pieces to when I get a chance.