First and foremost I like to see myself as an artist. And with that I tend to always reinvent myself and my website which, more or less, is a reflection of me. I’m also pretty heavy into freelance work, so time for myself is limited when I’m trying to get the bills paid, so I don’t really take into consideration my own site - when I should be putting a lot of work into making it the best I can! I’m sure a lot of designers have this same issue when you work a day job, do a ton of freelance and try to manage time being with your family. Your personal products tend to slack.

So, what I’ve decided to do is rewrite my site from scratch and documenting everything along the way. I’m going to plan it out this time with a little help from Kelly Goto’s book “Web Redesign”. I need to really think out my out website to be a good reflection of the services I provide as a web designer and print designer.

Key things I want to do:

1. I wrote my own php web framework a while ago that is actually quite good for SEO. Why I’m using wordpress is beyond me. I’ve managed to get really good ranking for my clients when using it. So I’m going to reimplement it on my site and migrate away from wordpress. Since I’m a developer, it makes sense for me to showcase what I can do, rather than showcase someone elses product.

2. Swoopty Javascript and Ajax stuff. I’m really getting into this Ajax bit, as well as advanced Javascript. Its amazing the cool stuff you can do with prototype and various other libraries. For UI based stuff, I like Qooxdoo, and for doing basic effects I think that prototype beats everyone hands down.

3. More articles and tutorials. I really need to share my knowledge more in order to let people know that I really know what I’m talking about. Come one…I’ve been doing this for over 12 years, and I still get people asking me what exactly do I do. Better communication is necessary.

4. Examples. People want to see examples of the designs and coding that I’ve done. I really need to show more of the web designs, print designs, book designs, and other coding examples. I plan on making an ajax play area where I can experiment more with ajax and hopefully provide some insight to the internet community.

5. CSS and HTML compliant. I just did some coding for a website that was very strict about the validation of their code - both html and css. I pulled it off, and I tell you that it was the best feeling to have made something that works on all platforms, browsers, and still validated 100% with no errors. It really is important for a web designer.

Thats about all I can think of right now, but I plan on starting this probably in a week or so. So if anyone reads this stuff, expect me to really start moving and (hopefully) plan this redesign out right so I don’t have to really do it again.