Yesterday I launched the brand new homepage of my portfolio. It was a long time in the making trying to get everything looking good and now I’m going to explain the reasons behind the design, how I came to it and how you can apply the same techniques.

Keep it simple

It’s a portfolio right? When people visit your site what do you want them to see? If you’ve not said “my portfolio” then your wrong. If someone is looking for a web designer they need to see your work. How can anyone gauge your quality if they don’t see it!?

According to the analytics on this site just under 9% of people visiting the site in September went to the Portfolio page after visiting the homepage. That’s pretty poor in anybody’s book. It means they saw the homepage, scanned it and decided it wasn’t for them. Keep it lite, simple and clear to distinguish what you want people to actually see. I decided that instead of hoping people would visit the portfolio I’d make it the first thing they see.

Think of it as a CV (Resume)

You don’t need to put your qualifications on there or anything detailed but imagine it’s a CV dropped on someones desk. Are they going to see the information they need to see? Critical things to put on a homepage at minimum include;

• Examples of recent work completed.
• A short bio on yourself (including a personal photo to “connect” with the visitor)
• Contact information

They need to see who you are, what you do, and an example of what you’ve done. They also need to get in touch with you if they like what they see.

Personalise it

This is where my original homepage initially went wrong. It looked too professional and didn’t feature any personal touches. It now features my Twitter posts, which is great if your twitter posts are acceptable for the public, and a short description on who I am, what I do and what I like to do. Visitors can then “connect” by reading your tweets or even following you.

You could also include your LinkedIn profile, flickr photos (I include TwitPic photos), blog posts, journal entries, Google Maps (when I tweet I can select to locate, which updates the Google Maps in the top blue bar) practically anything personal. It can give your work that extra edge in helping people remember you.

Try something different

If someone sees a neat little feature of your website that they like they’re probably more inclined to remember you. I’ve really wanted to tinker with the Last.FM API for a while now but have never needed to. I decided to implement it onto the homepage so people can see what I like to listen to. It’s always nice to know if someone listens to a lot of Slipknot or a bit of Robbie Williams. It could be that extra connection your looking for. Kean Richmonds site explores this perfectly on his about page and was recently showcased on CSS Mania.

Subtlety is the key

It’s the latest web trend. Not everything has to be black on white or yellow on black. Take it down to a pixel level as it definately makes a difference.Try using gentle shadows, 1 pixel width highlights, 1 shade different hovers on hyperlinks, subtle backgrounds, light colours and small gradients to take your design to the next level.

Take Adii Rockstars website for example. If you look closely at the edge of elements you’ll see the 1px wide shadows and highlights and very simple gradients which make this a very nice design.

Check out my homepage for another example. I tried to stick to as little amount of colours as possible to keep consitency. By using very light shadows I was able to re-use the same colour to create a border around the images without including an extra colour such as white. It really simplifies the design and keeps it clean.

Don’t pretend

Like to think of yourself as a company, rather than a freelancer? Think again. If your a freelancer exploit it! You’ve done all this work yourself, don’t let people think for a second that it’s a company behind the brand, it’s you, and your visitors should know that from the get-go.

To sum up…

Don’t be afraid to…

• try something different. If your stuck, look deep into some of the greater designs you like.
• be personal, most people are more willing to employ you if they already know who you are
• think outside the box, how do you display your CV? Can you take some pointers from that?
• show off! It’s your work, your visitors should be able to see it straight away!
• open up a bit. Having a blog or a Twitter feed can enforce that connection

I hope you like the design as much as I enjoyed building and researching it. If you have any questions or opinions please feel free to air them!

Here we go with the biggies…

1. SmashingMagazine.com

Packed full of daily web resources from desktop calendars to tips on learning CSS. They have also recently had a redesign massively cleaning up the content (which was pretty bad on my opinion) and also aggregating content from websites such as spyrestudios.com, buildinternet.com and webdesignerwall.com. All of which are also great resources…

2. WebDesignerDepot.com

Not specific in it’s content, Web Designer Depot seems to feature everything from Illustrator spotlights (like the recent one on the amazing Archan Nair) all the way to freebies such as the nice RSS icon set. I do however recommend they remove the horrible “I WAS a fat slob” adverts on the right as it’s pretty dire to see (see screenshot to the right)…

3. Spyrestudios.com

Is very good at eyeing up great web designs and showcasing them on their site. They are a small design agency in Canada but have a great blog. They also recently showcased my website because of it’s use of cufon, the amazing javascript text replacement (towards the bottom of the list).

4. BestWebGallery.com

Not a brilliant resource per se but it does feature some amazing modern designs. Not to be used as a starting point for designs but rather as “subliminal inspiration”.

5. BuildInternet.com

Build Internet is managed by twins Sam and Zach Dunn and is a great place to read more about the business side of website design. It’s packed full of jQuery tutorials, graphic design resources, CSS information and HTML tips. Give it a look.

Now for the smallies, generally sole developers who blog about their industry, not necessarily “small”…

6. Adii Rockstar

Now Adii is quite a little celebrity online. He’s known well for his work on the WooThemes project which sells premium wordpress themes but makes for a very interesting read.

7. Fabio Sasso

He’s the guy behind abduzeedo.com and seems to be in deep in the website design world. He has some great work to check out and is involved in a large number of successful websites packed full of resources and inspiration.

8. Veerle Pieters

A graphic/web designer from Belgium, Veerle has tons of posts from over the years covering stuff from html to illiustrations. It makes for an interesting read if you dig deep into the older content. You’ll also see just how much a great designer knows about their industry when you read Veerle’s blog.

9. Collis

Probably should reside in the biggies list but because we aren’t talking about his amazing success story, Envato, he slots into the smallies. He’s the CEO of one of the largest and greatest design marketplaces on the web. He has his own blog called the Netsetter which covers mainly covers the business side of the design industry. (he also features a lot of guest writers too)

10. Chris Spooner

Because he’s a local boy! Chris was born and raised in Sheffield, UK, and runs his blog over at Spoon Graphics. He posts some great content covering mainly graphic design but it a great source of inspiration.

There are many more people to check out in the web design world, you just have a dig, and when you find them either subscribe to their RSS feed or follow them on Twitter like a stalker. Either way you’ll get great resources and good reads!

Also see @liammckay @kevinrose @shauninman @jasonfried

Every web developer should (and probably does) use these tools on a daily basis. They streamline your development and help speed up little niggles with your site.

Web Developer Toolbar

This handy toolbar includes features such as in browser CSS editing which lets you see CSS changes live, the ability to disable Javascript, Cookies, CSS and Images (for usability testing) and includes many handy features.

Some fancy tricks also include:

• Element outlining
  This allows you to see which <div/input/anything> tags are lining up wrong and combined with the CSS editor proves a powerful tool in element alignment.
• Disabling CSS
  This allows you to see how your layout holds up with browsers which don’t support CSS (such as screen readers). If your content is laid out poorly, it. will. be. read. out. loud. poorly.
• Browser Resizing
  Want to see how your site looks in a 1024×768 browsers? Click the re-size button and the toolbar will set your browser window to any size you specify!
• Quick Validation links
  Want to know if your XHTML or CSS validates? There’s quick handy links under the Tools drop-down.
• Generated Source vs Source
  Is your Javascript messing up your code? Then view the Generated Source to see what it’s actually doing to your pages.
• Quickly Edit HTML & CSS in-line
  It’s a quick and dirty way to see how your new CSS/HTML code works in your site. Simply open the editor and type away to see your page update live.

There’s many more options you can play with. All you need is Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Firebug

Firebug is a tool used by almost every web developer in the world. If you’ve not installed it yet, do it immediately as it will save you many man hours fixing bugs in your websites code. It’s had over 19 million downloads and averages 22,000 downloads every day.

Colorzilla

When I can’t remember how to count in hex (which often happens) I use Colorzilla. It makes sure my #009ecc is not #02a4d3 and that my #666 isn’t #999. It’s best to keep consistency and is what separates a good designer, with a great designer.

There’s loads more Firefox Add-ons you could also check out:

• YSlow https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
• Pixel Perfect https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7943
• Firecookie https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6683
• PageDiff https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4274

Internet Explorer Developer Tools

On the Internet Explorer front there’s not much for the modern Web Developer. However, using the Firefox tools above covers most if not all of your needs, except for IE8, IE7 and IE6 testing. This is what I’ll go over next.

The best tool is actually one released by Microsoft themselves. The aptly named Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar which gives you a few tools to play with which include a CSS and HTML editor, the ability to disable CSS and images, use a colour picker and outline elements. It’s basically a shorter version of the Firefox web developer toolbar. It also allows you to quickly switch between IE7 and IE8 browser rendering. Simply select which browser mode you need and you can see what your page looks like in IE7.

Now for IE6 (cringe). I know a lot of developer are now dropping support but as previously mentioned sometimes it’s not an option, and we sometimes need to think about this when developing mass market websites.

Spoon.net

It’s a tool I only recently found and because Microsoft won’t properly develop something which lets you run IE6 on your machine, Spoon developed a browser plug-in which lets you run ANY browser, well, IN browser. They call it “App Virtualization” and I call it magic as it let’s you run IE6! (note, as of writing I couldn’t get it to buffer on Windows 7 64-bit but could on Vista (32) and XP (32), let me know, maybe it needs to be XP Virtualized?)

Adobe BrowserLab

This amazing tool lets you preview your pages side by side and even overlay pages (known as onion skin). You can also preview your site in many browsers which include Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Safari 3/4 and Firefox 2/3. The only downside is you can’t preview it as a functional page so can only be used for styling sakes, and it’s a little slow to run sometimes.

I hope you found these tools useful for your web developing needs and good luck (you’ll need it if your working with IE6)

So it’s 4 months in on my new job and I’ve finally just launched the brand new Result Group website. It’s three solid months of development, hundreds and hundreds of tweaks, 1500+ lines of CSS and thousands more of XHTML programming and PHP. It’s built entirely by hand, no cheap CMS systems and no limitations on scalability. It also runs part of the site on WordPress (see the Rental News section).

Result Group develop world leading Rental Management Software and they needed a world class website to go along with that. The site was redesigned from the ground up by myself and there has been a lot of work chucked into a very fast moving three months. We finally went live last week and as of now, all hiccups seem to have been rubbed out.

It also uses GeoIP technology to direct you to the correct regional site (United States visit us.rentalresult.com while UK visit www.rentalresult.com).

It really was a mammoth task and one in which I’m very proud to have built solely.

Go check out Result Groups rentalresult website for their rental software and check out the design and jQuery loveliness.

So University is done and dusted for 2009. I won’t be returning until September 2010 which makes for a nice break. In the end I got my grades (A,A,B,B,B,C) which I was very happy with. To top all this off I thought I’d showcase some of the work I did to receive these grades.

Visual Design (B Grade)

I’ll start with a Module I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this year due to boring briefs, however, I did a little bit of illustration for it which included some postage stamps, posters and even included some Video in After Effects. You can see the video, the illustrations and the posters over at http://turnitoff.info/ (the posters reside in the footer of the page)
The site was built using the latest in Javascript and jQuery technology so check it out, hover over the elements, play with the buttons. Your probably better off using FireFox too, as IE couldn’t really handle it’s superior web modernness. Make sure you check out the video at the bottom of the website too (yes that is me speaking sounding common as muck).

For Visual design I also illustrated the stamps shown in the header image. It’s based on Music Technology over the years and I think I captured the best four from the past century or so. You can see them in all their vector glory too.

Multimedia Product (C Grade)

This was a complex one, which also means I can’t demonstrate it online. The idea was simple, Unique Bidding auctions.

The site featured a worlds first in online bidding. Live real time bidding in auctions. You could actually watch LIVE bidders placing their respective amounts on the page as it went along. This meant users could bid against each other based on other users’ bids. Clever eh! It was all jQuery and PHP grabbing the data from a database. It was awfully complex and also included a 10,000 word document explaing the process and research behind it. There was also a very fancy presentation which explains the fundementals if anyone wants to watch it. Its the branding, the functionality and the UI all rolled into a short few slides.

It also had it’s own iPhone web application which tied into the whole site shwoing live bids from anywhere in the world at any time.

Web Programming (A grade)

Another interesting one. And one which I actually really enjoyed.

Assignment one involved building a file based Guestbook with full admin features, the ability to edit posts and delete them, a swear word filter to stip out those naughty words and a slick simple UI. It also had AJAX editing of comments right in the page. No loading, no navigating, just click and change! I think you can guess what Lady Part and Ping Pongs were supposed to say! It maybe available as a free download if anyone is interested in the future.

Assignment two was a dog database website. Very similar to Battersea dogs homes website. It needed full admin controls and the ability to save dogs as favourites and have the ability to search the dogs too. The brief was very extensive, and I covered everything. Check it out online right now. I ended up building a commercial site based on this for Cliffe Kennels.

Authoring (B Grade)

It was basically Actionscript 3.0 work. For assignment 1 I had to develop an interface which included an animation, using the drawing API and the components within Flash 8. I ended up building a Spirograph kind of application which allowed you to colour it yourself and watch the application build it for you. Very nice! Have a look at it. I also built a flash gallery using XML and class files. But it’s not something I have online at the moment.

Multimedia Design & Production (A Grade)

This is a group project, and something which is a real challenge working with four different creative minds. My University chum Chris Kovalenko was part of our A grade group which created a chairty website and CDROM called the West Yorkshire Autistic Society (completely fake). Check out the site.

Intro to Video (B Grade)

My mate Adam Fisher helped me out with this one as I couldn’t star, edit and film the whole video. He rode the bike, I edited it, The Chemists supplied the music. It actually works quite well for my first every video. So I’m quite happy with it as a 2nd year project.

That’s it! I hope this gives someone some kind of inspiration either for university or for their next project. If it did help you in any way shape or form, drop me a comment!

Well, it seems I have more time on my hands than I need. Wednesday my on-line chum Matt decided he wanted to “build something”. Anything he said. He was open to suggestions. One of those was a Twitter photo search. To cut a long story short I stole by own suggestion and built it myself.

TwiPho was born out of two days coding (Thursday, 7th May and Friday 8th May) which accumulated to about 8 hours coding. Not bad to say I visited Alton Towers on Friday too.

Anyway, TwiPho is a Twitter Photo Search engine. It uses Twitters brilliant API (which I wrote about Wednesday) including TwitPic’s API, img.ly’s API and yfrog’s API. All Twitter image hosts. It searches though Twitter to find images related to a search keyword and shows you the images. 100% JavaScript, 100% AJAX. It uses the powerful jQuery framework too, which is a massive boost for my programming ego.

Anyway please have a look at it over at http://twipho.net/ and even let you friends know about it on Twitter!

It’s even been featured on jQuery Style, so thanks again to them!

Fancy riding 1,200 Miles across the UK starting from Lands End and finishing at John O Groats? No? Me neither!

These two guys are though (Adam Fisher and Oliver Frearson) and I felt obligated to build them a website promoting their journey. It’s in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support and they are trying to raise £3000 (that’s only £2.50 per mile!).

Check out the website, visit their blog (which will be updated en route) and give them a bit of support.

If your feeling generous you can also donate by clicking the big donate button on the top left corner. Anything will do, even 1 pence, it all adds up.

The other day I realised I had loads of spare web stuff lying around on my hard drive which included canned designs, unused web pages, old university assignments and old website designs (PSD’s and XHTML/CSS).

Well, today I decided I’d start releasing this spare stuff online. If I’m not using it maybe someone else can get something out of it. That was the idea behind the WordPress Olivia template, it was an old design which morphed into a pretty popular free template.

Anyway, we start this new routine of free downloads with a free XHTML template complete with instructions on how to use and modify it.

You can view a demo of the free XHTML theme or even download it for yourself to dissect, prod and poke.
There is also a tutorial on how to edit the pages, adding paragraphs and headers and also how to edit the CSS. It’s a basic tutorial but it explains the beginner methods.

Unfortunately there won’t be much support for it. You’ll have to work it out for yourself. If you are really really stuck you can drop comments for this post below and I’ll try my damn hardest to answer. Honest.

Download (370kb) | View Demo

Many developers struggle to use the basic tools in Adobe’s award winning software Photoshop when designing websites. It can help a lot to know some simple techniques and tools when building XHTML pages. You don’t have to use the very awful splicing function at all.

Let’s start with the idea of building a very simple design using a set colour palette and a set width. After these simple tips I will also supply a number of useful links to visit to help you further.

Let’s boot up Photoshop and start with a new blank file. Choose a preset width and height (I’m using 1024×768) and let’s get designing!

Initially we need a colour palette for inspiration. If you want help see Adobe’s Kuler application. It’s awesome. Once you have found your colour palette you can then download it (provided your registered and logged in) open it and your colours will jump straight into Photoshop (Window>Swatches)! How cool!

Pick your favourite background colour (I’m using #ff8548) and fill the background. Then create two guide lines 960 pixels apart (or any other distance apart) and place them in the center. (If your not sure how to do this simply download 960 Guides). We now have a simple layout. Next we need to setup our header and navigation.

It’s as easy as writing some text and placing it at the top of the page. Make sure you keep the margins your giving the text around the edges the same. You could do this by making small 10px x 10px boxes and using these as padding. You could also draw more guide lines by dragging them from the rulers around the page. (If you can’t see them tap Ctrl+R) Using rulers and guises to position all your elements on the page is the best way to keep everything aligned and tidy. This is a fundamental in website design.

You can also use Lorem Ipsum (dummy text) to help see how your layout looks on the page.

Stick to the colours in your colour palette and have a play. I drew up a quick dummy web page with some lorem ipsum, a title and a navigation bar. I also drew in some guides to position my content better and to keep everything tidier. If you would like to download this PSD file be my guest. Pull it apart and see what you like.

This simple design could be a the building blocks of your first website.

Check out the following links to help you further;

1. Lorem Ipsum
2. Adobe Kuler
3. 960 Grid System
4. Web Designer Wall
5. Best Web Gallery
6. CSS Based
7. Pixel2Life Tutorials