Who I Am

My name is Matthew Weaver. I'm a writer, a photographer, and a music enthusiast, but I don't limit myself to those titles. I love working with design, building websites, traveling, among other things.

Currently, I'm a Creative Writing major at Grand Valley State University. I study writing in all its forms, but my emphasis is in fiction (short stories, mostly) and creative nonfiction (personal essays, memoir). I also occasionally write about music, from album reviews to live show previews, and I have worked for two publications. The first was Wonkavision Reviews, an online album review page for the music publication Wonkavision. The second was a short-lived publication Current & Whether, based in Grand Rapids and centered around advertising art galleries, independent shows, and other events in the Grand Rapids area.

More information about my professional career can be seen on my Resumé page.

What This Is

This website is my home base. Eventually, I hope to expand it so it includes my writing blog, where I post snippets of pieces in progress and any musings I have for that day, but for now, it's showing off what the pieces of writing, photography, and music I have created.

The Writing page features flash fiction, short stories and nonfiction pieces I have written, including the piece George Marshall, which received honors at GVSU through the AWP Intro Journals Award, with second place at the university level. I was pretty pumped about it.

The Photography page has the pictorial evidence of my adventures in the world. I shoot with a Nikon D40 and am definitely a hobbyist, but I love it, and it gives me inspiration for my writing.

Music is a page different than the rest. It's noticeably bare, if only because I have nothing to put there yet. I have some reviews of albums I've done, which have been published online through Wonkavision Reviews. That's the extent of my musical career. I'm learning instruments and trying to play more, so I'm hoping to have links to songs and the like very soon. At the least, there's content there. That's a step in the right direction.

Surprisingly enough, the Resumé page is for my resumé. It also contains my professional contact information and a short blurb on what I do, what I want to do and any career aspirations I may have.

Design Report

When it comes to a personal website, I personally believe the most important parts are the content--naturally, considering a personal website is an advertisement for yourself--and the ability to navigate simply. When I decided to build my website, the first thing I wanted to do was design a page that was fluid, that only required a single click for the person to get where they wanted to go. In addition, once they got there, I wanted to provide them with links within the body of the page, so they could easily move from place to place without too much scrolling or thinking.

I wanted the home page to leap out at the user. I wanted them to be involved with the website immediately, and to make it interesting for them to browse and read. As Redish states in Letting Go of the Words, ". . . your web site is part of a conversation. You set the tone for your side of the conversation by sharing the web site's personality with your site visitors" (31). I wanted people to be involved with the site from the get-go, which is why the homepage consists of a short description of who I am, so they can better understand what the content is about, and then short descriptions of each section of the website, which address the user directly and engage them in the website, and "in most situations, people get the information from active sentences more quickly and more accurately than passive sentences" (Redish 184).

As far as design is concerned, I wanted something simple. I found a great template through the open-source designer Arcsin, who designs sites for many businesses and provides CSS templates for use by anyone, as long as proper credit is given. There were quite a few changes made to how the site functions and some minor personal choices when it came to overall aesthetics. The green is easy on the eyes, a very neutral color that, to me, relaxes and draws the eye toward the center of the page, where the content is. The top banner consists of rotating images, all taken by me, which contribute to setting the tone discussed in the first previous section, something I integrated after being inspired by Aaron Tubergen. I wanted users to be able to move from place to place without dealing with a lot of hassle, which is why there are so many links within the body of the website: there's not a lot of scrolling involved.

The image gallery on the Photography page is Lightbox2, a simple script that takes images in a gallery and overlays larger versions within the site itself, without a lot of complicated coding and flash.

All of the other content on the site is my property: on the Writing page, I have two works listed, with PDF links to both of them, so users can see the full versions of the documents (I did provide previews on the page itself, so users aren't forced to download the PDF). On the Resumé page, I did the same thing, although the text isn't pulled from the document itself: I decided to discuss my current "professional" life and then provide a link to my resumé, which provides a history.

Overall, a lot of effort went into tweaking the design to make it as aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate as possible. In addition, I wanted to rely on content created by me, which is why the bulk of the site is my own work, save the site's structure and the galley script.