So I’ve finally gotten around to (re-)doing my personal website, and it’s now more or less ready for the public to see. I still have a few things to do – some features to add, some content types to style, some prettifying to do, some markup to clean up – but I’m generally pretty happy with it.
If you’ve spoken with me face-to-face at some point, you may know that I’ve actually been making an effort to get a site done for a while, and have produced countless (okay, maybe not countless, but at least three dozen) mockups over the last year and a half. However, never being quite happy with them, pulling the trigger and implementing any of these became tough. This one had a little extra motivation behind it, though, and manged to get done, at least mostly.
Extra motivation, you ask? Why, yes. I’d given myself deadlines before, such as finishing before Refresh Orlando in November, or before Web Directions North in February, but these deadlines took a backseat to real work and other personal priorities. What really motivated me to get this done “by” (well, I guess it got done “during”) SXSW was everyone else working on projects and talking about them over Twitter. Yes, I know, everyone and her sister is babbling on about Twitter, but in this case, seeing everyone else toiling to get their personal sites, side projects, and major projects done before SXSW really got me moving on doing my own site.
A couple of notes: This is all built on a grid, which is a feature common to other sites I really enjoy. There is a sprinkling of Microformats here and there, though they will be further fleshed out in the coming days. The site incorporates OpenID for login, which means you can use your LiveJournal, AOL/AIM, Wordpress.com, or other OpenID to easily login to post comments on this site. Besides that, it’s pretty much your standard dish. If you’re looking at this in Firefox, Safari, or IE7, it should look okay, but I spent no extra time worrying about IE6… power of positive thinking, eh?
Though I plan to reimplement in Django in the near future (ahem), this site currently runs on Wordpress, which made implementation quite simple and quick. There’s a Kubrick theme somewhere in this, though I think the vast majority of the template code has been changed and customized.
I get a lot of inspiration from newspaper design, and so the sites of Khoi Vinh and Jeff Croft served as inspiration as well. Of course there were a million other inspirations in the course of making this design as well, but I hope that I amalgamated them all enough to create something that is indeed my own.
A few people to thank, of course, as is required in these types of posts. Thanks to the folks in the office – Kevin McCann, Matthew Bradley, and Paul Kittredge, among others – for giving me a break the last week or so while I buckled down to get this done. To the Twitterites who, as mentioned, motivated me to get into gear, including Jonathan Snook, Kevin Tamura, busy bee Cindy Li, Jason Garber, Kevin Lawver, and many others. Lastly, thanks to Cindy Li (again), Lauren McNally, Samara Strauss, Laura Schweitzer, and Ali Cherry for giving me feedback and talking through things that needed a good friend’s feedback.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and I hope to be posting interesting content regularly. Drop me a line (jackson at my domain) if you have any questions or comments.
First Post!!
No, really - looks great! Well done, Jackson.
Here from Andy Budd’s post on airports. This post seemed like the right place to mention that “create movements around casues, companies, and products” at the top right should probably be “causes” (and the red links are a little hard to read on the black background). Now I’m off to read about the Metro map….
Thanks for the check, Jen! Once I get around to actually changing something on this again (after taking a year to just get it up), I’m sure I’ll address that, among other things. Cheers!