Over the past several weeks I have been working on redesigning and reorganizing my Parsons MFADT documentation/thesis/portfolio site. The process has been extremely overwhelming, realizing that there is so much content that I have been creating over the past year. My previous site was mostly used as a static portfolio site, which linked to my parsons blog. Both were designed with a similar look and feel, but as time went on I realized it was too busy. The blog portion was poorly organized, and all the content seemed to be just thrown into the shell.

My goal in redesigning my site was to develop a clean crisp site design, complemented by an organized and easily updatable and manageable back-end. The most useful tool in doing this, was to create and skin a customized wordpress blog. I looked around for a theme that I liked, based not on its visual appearance, but more-so on its navigation and functionality. After finding The Side Blog I went on a skinning rampage. I gravitated towards a hand-drawn simple look, because I felt like it added a nice personal touch. On the back end of things, I customized the blog to display certain posts on certain pages, so that all my content was organized by class and subject matter. I added several different jQuery plug-ins to add light-box galleries throughout the site, as well as the image slider on the home page.

There is still a ton more I want to do to the site. I have spent the past few days developing the side bar navigation, to correlate with the specific pages that the user is on. I also want to migrate all of my portfolio work to this site so I can get rid of my old site all together. I also am a little behind on documenting some of my projects from last year. Lots to do….lots to do.

Tags: css, html, javascript, php, web design, wordpress
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