A New Website!

After years of building sites for other people I decided it was finally time to build my own. The hardest part about building a new website for yourself is that it is never going to be good enough — you are your own worst critic. In looking for inspiration from other front-end portfolio sites I noticed a disappointing trend: a lot of these portfolio websites were simply store-bought themes with some minor tweaks. There are thousands of portfolio themes and templates to be had for a nominal fee. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a practical solution and you can have a beautiful site up in minutes. For my purposes, I thought it would be more appropriate for a front-end developer to build their portfolio from the ground-up.

I already knew I wanted to build my site on WordPress so at the end of the day I decided that I should flex my own skills a bit and do just that — build my theme from scratch.

Responsive or Not?

Absolutely. It’s an undeniable fact that the majority of browsing is done from some form of mobile device, so making my site responsive was an absolute must. The question became whether to use a whole responsive framework like Twitter Bootstrap or Foundation, or come up with another solution. These frameworks are incredibly powerful and have built-in tools that developers can leverage to frame entire sites in very little time with a lot of beautiful details dialed-in for you. They’re also loaded with more than I would ever need and could weigh down the speed of my site.

I did some basic math and built my own (and very lightweight) grid.

What’s Coming

I’m already serving all of my images via Amazon S3, but soon I’ll add page caching, and soon I’ll finish building out my portfolio page using custom post-types and fields. More on that later.

This will be a continual work in progress, but I really hope you enjoy my new site!