1 Year On

Today is the 1 year anniversary of the launch of my full website, meaning that my blog has now been running for about two and a half years!

To commemorate a year of making the internet a bit more green, I’ve made a list so you can take a look over some of the coolest things that have happened…

• I visited Madrid on my lonesome and loved it
• Completed an internship with Sky Sports
• Jetted off to New York with design friends
• Began a project working with the Design Council
• Spent summer in Germany with the Smith family
• Had fun with the rest of the Leeds Uni scholars in the Yorkshire Dales
• Visited Portugal with my family to relax

My lovely little website has done me quite well for the past 12 months of adventures, and having my own space to share a multitude of projects and all sorts of things has been a godsend – but I’ve developed a this year and learned much.

The original design approach for my website was for optimum legibility, simplicity of the highest order, and easy navigation. I like to think that my stripped-back design has ticked all these boxes, however I’ve come to realise that it’s been at the expense of other important considerations.

The green, for example, has meant that an overview of my portfolio doesn’t reveal much in the way of how varied my projects and their styles can be, and it can sometimes get confusing when titles and links are the same colour.

My rigid width main column on desktop and tablet have kept my text in a state of optimum legibility, however on today’s increasingly large displays, lots of space is seen to be wasted.

The pop-open menu was removed earlier this year to facilitate a contact button, however this has meant that new pages are easily lost. My mobile website layout leaves a lot to be desired.

Behind the scenes, though, is where things have gotten really messy. With new pages (such as Travel and Photography) being added after launch, and with my initial coding structure and architecture, it’s been a real challenge to update, maintain and add new pages anywhere outside of my blog. Assets go missing, I get confused where I should be putting files, and updates are always a bit of a clunky disaster. 

My problems doubled with the introduction of the Spanish version of my site, which is a duplicate of the English version, and so isn’t always kept as up to date as I’d like. Having the same file in two places is an absolute nightmare when it comes to version control…

All this can only really mean one thing – it’s time for an update. The coding definitely needs an overhaul and so what better time to have a stab at a redesign for the next two and a half years?

I will be posting blog posts frequently during the forseeable future to outline my progress, and I’d love your feedback on Facebook, via Twitter, or in an email.

I’d also like to thank the 5,000+ of you who visited my blog this past year, and everyone who’s left such lovely comments. I love documenting what I’ve been up to, and would continue to do so if nobody read this and it was just as a personal little account of things, but it’s really humbling to have you all on board.

Here’s to the next quarter of a decade!