therouxDown

Over a year after registering this domain, I have finally put together a site that I’m ready for the world to see.

Why did it take so long? I really don’t have a good excuse. There is no excuse. The fact is, no self-respecting web professional should be without their own domain in this day and age.

If you’re interested in how I coded and designed this blog, keeping reading…

Building Blocks

WORDPRESS—I knew from the start I wanted to build the blog with WordPress. Its blogging functionality can’t be beat, and it makes a solid CMS for simple sites.

Plus, its community is excellent, and there exists a plugin to do almost anything I’d want.

Blueprint CSS—Grid-based CSS frameworks have been all the rage for the past year or so, and I have been itching to try one out. What better place than my own blog?

Out of the many available CSS frameworks (YUI Grids, 960 Grid System, YAML…) I chose Blueprint for a simple reason—it’s maintained by my friend & former co-worker Christian Montoya.

The learning curve has been fairly shallow, although I must admit Blueprint is forcing me to design in terms of em based font sizes for the first time, which was embarrassingly difficult at first.

jQuery—I’m currently using jQuery to draw some drop shadows behind a few <div>s. It’s not essential, but it’s a nice touch and saves me from mucking around in Photoshop every time I want to tweak the design. In order to improve site performance, the jQuery library is being hosted by Google.

In the future I’ll undoubtedly incorporate more and more jQuery into my work—when tasteful and appropriate, of course.

Graphic Design

Caveat—I’m not a graphic designer professionally. I’m just a guy with a copy of Photoshop and sometimes too much free time.

Graphic design is at the same time thrilling and utterly terrifying for me. When I get it right, I’m euphoric—but when I perceive a flaw, the flaw consumes my entire field of vision. Worse yet, oftentimes I’ll know something’s not quite right with one of my designs, but I can’t figure out how to fix it.

Even though I don’t consider myself a graphic designer, I know I needed to create an absolutely 100% original design. This is my blog after all… I’d look a bit silly hawking my own skills but using someone else’s design, wouldn’t I?

My first concept (way back in late 2007) positioned me as a sort-of comic-book superhero designer. I actually coded most of this before feeling that it was too cartoon-ish. It didn’t communicate professionalism.

The second concept went too far in the opposite direction. When I tried to strip out the goofy soul, the design become an unwitting parody of web 2.0 candy-coated lacquer gradients.

Looking at those old designs melts my eyes and strangles my soul.

My final concept (the design you see now, assuming you’re reading this post on April 8, 2009) was, in retrospect, definitely influenced by the grunge trend in web design. I played with organic textures, but I did so according to my own terms—content & usability ahead of decoration, always.

Onward and Upwards

Let it be known that on this blog, I am always open for feedback and constructive criticism. Feel free to twitter @ me.

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