“Are you redesigning that site again?!”

1st November 2008 Design & Development, Portfolio

Hello and welcome to the all new www.mrleesimpson.co.uk and blog.mrleesimpson.co.uk. This is about the fifth time I’ve taken to redesigning this site in the last six months and the third time I’ve do it in the last two month.

Every time I put my mind into tackling it and make ago of revamping the site I’ve tended to either end up with something I didn’t like or with something that wasn’t really right for the job (including migrating the site to Tumblr). So this time I decided to take a good look around at what other designers where doing with their portfolio sites and try to take something from the people that have already set a good standard for how a site like this should look and work.

I’ve tried to keep it super simple and not over complicate any aspect of the design. I decided to go with a black, white and grey colour pallet (as this it one of the areas I’ve struggled with most in the past) and a clean two column layout for both the blog and the portfolio sections and main difference with this revision compared to the others I’ve done in the past is that this site uses two separate installs of Wordpress.

Why? Because although I think Wordpress is an awesome system, in the past I’ve tended to get bogged down in getting the CMS infrastructure I want from it. Thinking about it this is mostly down to a lack of experimenting, research and Wordpress backend knowledge, however I used two separate themes, Portfolio Theme by WP Daily and Firebug Theme from Blog Oh Blog, as the base code and developed them both to get where I am.

The site(s) is in no way perfect and looking at it now even in its ‘completed’ state I can see there are things I need to change and modify to get it up to scratch which hopefully I will be able to do over the next couple of weeks. In hindsight I should have taken more time to think about Wordpress and tried a little harder to get it down to one install whilst keeping the structure I was looking for, something to add to the list…

…but for the time being I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.