My Stories

Live!

Welcome everyone to my new website! What can I say? After a complete week of a painstakingly hard process of finally pulling all my pieces of work together into one simple website I’m well… both extraordinary happy and exhausted. There will be many new updates in the following days/weeks to the website so I would advise you keep watching my little space of the internet…

From here on I’m going to put this project aside and continue with my client work / new job seeking. So if you know of anyone who would like a website, or would like to employ someone who makes websites, please point them in my direction because I would be more than happy to talk with them.

So, as a going live present, I present you with the evolution of my chrisvincent.com.au!

Version 1: “Chris” Vincent’s Portfolio

Version 2: “Chris” Vincent’s Portfolio

Version 3: Chris Vincent < > Website Creator

Lets give a welcome to some much needed colour!

Ok, so the previous design that I had was a bit bland…. actually quite bland… so I’ve shown some of my more interesting design skills and given the website a bit of well needed colour.

You’ll notice that I like the soft use of gradients without them becoming overcontroling of the design. I would prefer for the design to have many many little tweaks and features just so it looks a lot more professional and… well… more interesting for me to create.

Website Updates

• Goodbye dodgy logo! It’s taken me a while to find something simple yet fancy but i’m quite happy with what’s up there right now. It may be changed slightly in the future but it’s good enough for the moment.
• I’ve slightly altered the look of the home page in the fact that i’ve lowered the content item of the website lower to bring focus to the website examples. I might at a later stage introduce maybe a few photoshop affects in the background or convert the website examples into a moving flash item… but they’re just ideas.
• I’m still tossing up about what to do with the portfolio, whether to add more websites and/or to change the layout of each page….
• I now have a much more noticable footer with a nice ‘contact me’ button down the bottom.
• I really don’t like the way the navigation menu is sitting up there….

Next task? Wordpress!

Focus Captures

Look to the left and you’ll see today’s little bit of accomplishment. It’s pretty much a whole lot of Wordpress custom fields with their own values, then strung together into groups and then the whole lot is ordered… and then displayed in the sidebar.

This will let me put a whole lot of information relating each story without having to clog up the story with too many pictures and links.

Here’s how it works when using Wordpress custom fields:

Name:

Global Focus
fc: (main focus order)

Focus Item
fc: (main focus order) : (item type) : (item order number)

Value:

Each value new line is in a Key:Value situation.

Global Focus
title : The global focus title

Image
src : The location of the image
url : What happens when the image is clicked
text : A caption for the image
title : What goes in the alt and title attributes of the image

Link
name : The link title
alt : A secondary link title
url : What happens when the image is clicked
text : A description for the link

Text
text : The content

The Pros

Because this little setup is quite dynamic I’ll be able to move ajust the content quite easily without having to use the old method of changing the html over and over again when I’m creating/altering a new story.

It’ll also give me the opportunity of adding javascript to a post without having to either alter the source code of Wordpress or have the trouble of using someone else’s plugin.

The Cons

It’s quite messy… This may become confusing when I start to use it, but once a few articles have been produced I’m sure that I’ll have the hang of it soon enough.

In the beginning…

So today I’ve decided to finally start up the pre creation section of my stories. Throughout my whole experience of creating my new and improved website portfolio I’ll be keeping what you could call a log of my experiences, thoughts and improvements, just so that I can keep on track with my project, and also have quite a lot of content ready for when this website goes live.

To date I now have 3 different revisions of what could have been my portfolio. The first two have just been ideas thrown in the dark and the last, and current, has been something that I’ve put a lot of thought into. At the moment I can see the end in sight but at the same time I’m constantely tweaking and re-defining my ideologies of what messages this portfolio should give to my potential clients and how it should do that.

Today my portfolio is constructed of quite a few static pages with 5 main pages: home, about me, my portfolio, my stories and contact me. In the past I’ve attempted multiple times to create a proper services page, but I’ve failed… quite miserably. This is what the layout currently looks like (minus most of the portfolio pages, which have been completed but I’ve decided not to show yet)…

Today’s thoughts

So today since my schedule has been pretty empty I’ve been exploring a few portfolios to source out some new ideas. I was looking over a few portfolios that belonged to companies that had been able to gain quite a few of the large scale clients when I noticed a few differences between what they have in their portfolios compared to what many freelancers place into their personal portfolios…

• No where in sight was there any mention of the skills of the employees involved. Instead the focus was on what their company could do to assist other companies via the internet.
• Project analysis was offered for companies to let the website company find out if they were the right people for the job, instead of the client at hand deciding for themselves without assistance to find out if a freelancer was up to the job.
• There was an assumption in the business that they were proffessional. All you needed to do was look at the clean website design.
• Printouts were offered.

Hopefully I’ll be able to use this list to my advantage to alter my current portfolio for the better so that I can attract more reputable clients.