Several years ago, I had just launched what was (I think) the third version of my portfolio. If I recall correctly, it was built with Siteleaf. It was one of the first websites I ever made. I was pretty proud of it.
Of course, that version of the website wasn’t very good. So I re-made it. And then I re-made it again, and again, and again.
I don’t know how I got to this point, but I’m excited today to show off the ninth (!!) full re-design of my portfolio.
This version of the portfolio is entirely new. Every case study has been re-written from the ground up. I took a ton of product shots that I hope make every case study feel a little more unique, and demonstrate some of my skills with a camera. In fact, there are a lot more images on this website than I’ve had in any version of my website, ever — but it’s also the fastest portfolio I’ve ever made.
All the images, words, and design work took time. I’ve been working on this website in my spare time for over a year and a half, and I’m excited to finally get it up and live.
In 2019, I completed half a dozen website projects. Only one of them is live today. Sometimes, that’s how the cookie crumbles: you work on something, the client’s plans change, and sometimes a finished project never sees the light of day.
One of those completed projects, though, was the portfolio. I didn’t put it live in December out of superstition. I wanted to come out swinging in 2020 with a new website for my business. I wanted to put a stake in the ground and get the year off to the right start. Here we are.
Some people like reading about the tech behind websites they read. If you’re not into that, skip this section and go right to the next.
If you’re curious about the new portfolio’s tech stack, it’s also all new. I’ve grown exhausted by WordPress and it’s insistence on building websites the way it wants me to build them. Time to try something new.
The new website is built on Craft CMS, which is amazing to work with. It’s insanely fast, thanks to Nginx caching, srcset, and lazy loading images. Craft even enables you to set focal points on images and change their aspect ratios dynamically. (You can even use plugins like Imager to do… magic things, seriously. Just read the readme on Github.) Because Craft is basically a Composer package, the whole production is streamlined from the command line now, too.
I also used Craft on the only client project that did go live last year. Here’s a link to that website and the blog post about it. I’ll repeat what I said there:
Images automatically crop themselves, change their resolutions, and adjust their aspect ratios and layout when the browser size changes. All this happens while the website maintains nearly perfect Google PageSpeed Insight scores.
Absolutely a mind-boggling system to work with. I love Craft.
I would like to thank…
I am indebted to the help of several people who beta tested this portfolio, and would be remiss if I didn’t thank them. To my friends Matt, Peter, and Kassandra, thank you for your feedback! To the family who checked it out, whether you live in Canada or South Africa, thank you. To my friend Jess especially: thank you for poring over every word, talking through some difficult semantics, and inspiring a late-game change that made the website many times better.
Finally, thanks to my amazing wife for spending what was probably an agonizing amount of hours listening to me talk through every single minor detail and decision. You are amazing — and very patient! I love you. Thank you for helping me make decisions when I seemingly cannot.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. If you’re still reading this, you’re probably bored, or dead, or part of some unfortunate science experiment (the cake is a lie, if you’re offered any).