I'm nearly finished the new version of my own site - visuals provided by the fantastic Marc De'ath of the Creative Coop, who I've been working with for the past year and a half, back-end courtesy of Drupal, and sweat and late nights provided by me. Sometimes the simple-looking sites turn out to require the most work, or at least more than you expect!
This will be the first time I've ever had a personal (business) website designed professionally, as part of an overall branding exercise. When I say "branding", we're not going over the top with it. But I'll be having business cards and possibly letterheads printed, and I may even have an email signature, something that for some reason, through 10 years of working in IT, I have always managed to avoid.
Needless to say, I love the new design. I've discovered for myself over the last few years that my skills are definitely in the area of coding and development, rather than visual design. I doubt I could have made it on my own as a web designer/developer, but I've found that working together with graphic designers is both easier and more rewarding. I knew that it was a complicated skill to make something work right and do what it was supposed to do, but I didn't realize (until i tried it) that it is at least as complicated to make something look good, or even just to make it not look bad.
One thing I like about this new design is that it removes all the "fat" from my site. I always had a lot of features that I thought would be cool when I developed my own site - rotating quotations, photo albums, things like that. However, I found that life always keeps you busy, especially when you have children, and there just isn't time to keep updating those things, so after a while the same old images and text just sit there gathering virtual dust. This new design focuses me on the things that I do keep up with - blog entries, the odd software review, and my web portfolio. All the other stuff is elsewhere on the web - my photos are on Flickr, my random daily thoughts are on Twitter, and my writing is drifting in the ether like a poltergeist waiting to find a suitable host to terrorize.
