anatomy of a re-design

What my site looked like before the re-design.

If you are a regular visitor of my site, you may have noticed that it had gone dormant for a while – no new work uploaded and no new blatherings on the blog. Well, that was because in the Spring of 2010 I entered the final phase of my Web Design and Development program at RISD, and a complete site overhaul was to be my final project. I figure as part of the unveiling of the new site I would share some of the process…

Above are some of the initial steps I took in shaping this site (click on icons for larger view). Before I began, 3 things were certain – I was going to switch my entire site over to WordPress (to make posting and updating easier), I was going to use the theme Thesis for the framework (to make changing the look of it easier when I decide to do so) and I wanted my “M” to look a lot less Aerosmithy – everything else was open for discussion.

And discuss we did – there were class critiques and our instructor, Eric Meier, spent a lot of one-on-one time pushing each of us in the direction we needed to go. If you look at the wireframes you can see I canned a few things – the jquery slider plugin I wanted to use for the portfolio wrecked havoc with any other java script I was running, the “contact” page seemed pointless as I had all that info in the sidebar anyway and – speaking of the sidebar – it got moved from the left to the right. (A decision that was made after I finalized the header design – it just looked better on the right, damnit!)

It was a lot of work, and I am happy with the results (although I am sure I will be itching to change it in a week or so). Hope you fancy the new look and arrangement also. Let me know what you think either via email or in the comments.