Design Report:
What’s going on here, anyway?
This section of my page is simply here to tell you a little bit about why I made this site and what I was thinking when I designed it.
I am in the very elementary stages of learning how to build a website. I’m learning how to design as well as build them. I know enough html and css to get it this far. I did all of that myself. The concept for the site is mine as well. My main goal in creating this website is this: That you, the user, will have an easy enough time getting around and getting the stuff that you want. I have no intentions of impressing you with my web design skills (not yet, anyway) so I wanted to keep it simple and navigable. Someday, I hope to be able to build something that is a little more visually stunning than this is. But for now, I have to work with the basics.
Before I built this on a computer, I had to build it in my head. I had to ask myself what I would include here and why. On its most basic level, this site serves to expose my talents (or lack thereof) and qualifications to the world. So it goes without saying that I had to stick my resume on there. Not before I revamped it a little bit, though. It’s a good idea to have your resume posted somewhere, especially in pdf form. It’s universally readable, and if you need to access it and you’re not around your home computer, you can get it there. So it’s up there. I have no intentions of wooing employers with this site for now. That being said, the page is still more than a rented storage space on the web for me. I had to put a little bit of my identity out there, too.
The menu at left is pretty spare: it includes links to the home page, a “Me” page, a “Web” page, and a link to my resume. For the “Me” section, I included a few links to projects I’ve completed. My Mini-Zen project is there, as well as a few things I created in past classes at GVSU. You’ll find PDFs of a RSS white paper I contributed to, as well as my portfolio from WRT 251 (Document Production and design). I typed a short, attention-deficit-disorder-themed biography of myself and put that under the “Me” section, and I threw in a few pictures (none too embarrassing) of myself and my family.
The “Web” section sort of adds to the Me section. There, you’ll find links to my blog and my MySpace, as well as a few different activities I’ve been involved in. Also, you’ll see a few bands I’m into and some sites I read. I also threw in the portfolio projects from the “Me” section, in case they get missed, as well as a special treat: A tribute to sloths.
Also included in the menu at left is a “What I’m reading” and “What I’m hearing” section. Those may or may not be periodically changed, depending on how I refine my musical and literary tastes.
There are just a few more elements on the page: The header, the footer, and my Wikipedia link. The header was something I created just to add some imagery to the site. I would like to refine it one day, by vectorizing the imagery using Adobe Illustrator. Beneath the header is a link to “Something important on Wikipedia.” This is just meant to be in good fun, it links to a random article on Wikipedia. It’s a good way to kill ten seconds of you need to. The footer at the bottom attributes all this stuff to me because, well, it’s mine and I made it.
I’ve reached a few hangups in my design stages. For example, I am still not content with the menu at left. I wanted to replace each menu option with imagery, some kind of text art, but I wasn’t sure how to create an image and allow it to be a link.
In creating some of the headers, I replaced the text with graphics successfully. I used pretty much the same coding I used in doing the same task on my Mini-Zen project.
The rhetoric of my website is pretty straightforward, and it represents me well: I’m not trying to be terribly serious, but I’m not being flippant. I tried to let my personality show a little bit (After all, this is my site) and I can’t lie and present myself as an all-business person. Perhaps one day, I’ll reach that point and create a fitting website. But for now, this one serves me well.
I am satisfied with the simplicity and ease of the site. Though, admittedly, the designer is not the best one to speak to the usability of his project. I had my brother, a graphic designer, check it out to give me some feedback and he agreed that it was simple and easy to get around. To me, it looks like a legitimate website, not a cookie-cutter frame from a blog service or a geocities site. I hope to build on this for the future, and I’d like to be able one day to create another better-looking, jaw-dropping site from scratch. I was happy with the way this turned out.