A New Site for Myself
For a long time I wanted to create a small and simple site that linked off to other sites that I have and/or use on a regular basis, like Twitter, Flickr, etc. The About page of this site links to a bunch of my sites, however, I can’t expect people to hit my about page when they visit the site. And when signing up on new sites and such, I won’t be putting the URL to my about page. Overall, I just needed a central hub for myself.
Of course the hard part, like any other personal project, is finding the time to get the site done. Well finally, with some free time and inspiration, I got it done.
Enter, johnphillips.me. The goal of this site is simple, to give you a quick glimpse of who I am, link out to my sites, and give you my contact information. I needed the design to do just that, and not get in the way. I only spent a few hours in Photoshop before I was ready to start coding it up. After a few days, it was all done and live.
Inspiration
Over the past 6(ish) months, I stumbled across some very nice one-page sites that gave me a lot of ideas on how I wanted to approach doing a site for myself. The biggest inspiration was from, both, Tim Van Damme, and Rogie King. I think both of their sites are absolutely stunning, and both accomplish exactly what I was looking to do with my own site. So, from an IA standpoint, it made sense to do something similar. So I’d like to thank them for inspiring me.
Browsers
When I was done designing the site, I had a feeling that it might be a pain getting everything to look how I wanted it to in all the browsers. Turned out that it went pretty smoothly… sort of. I chose to not spend much time worrying about IE6. Now, normally I don’t do this, especially for client sites. But this is no client site, nor is it an end destination. It’s meant to send you elsewhere.
As long as the content displays in IE6, which it does, I did not want to invest anymore time in it. It’s really time for people to upgrade their browsers to something modern… but I’ll save that debate for another blog post.
So, go visit the new site, and let me know what you think about it. Also, let me know if you find any issues or if anything is broken. Thanks!
8 Comments
Very nice, John. It’s a neat alternative to putting all of this stuff on your site’s home page in the hope that it won’t be buried.
Thanks Warren. Yeah I don’t really want people to have to dig around to find out where I’m active the most on the web. The less clicks, the better!
This looks really great, I love the direction you went with it. I’ve been thinking of how I want to revamp my portfolio to include my other online activity/spaces as well, so thank you for the inspiration!
Thank you Angela! Let me know if you need an extra hand with ideas. I’d definitely help out.
I’m trying out different ideas for my site as well. Looking great John!
Thanks Shauna. Let me know if you need to bounce ideas off me. I like helping out others.
Well done.
I’ve noticed a trend towards minimalism, but 2009 strikes me as the year of uber-minimalism, as more and more people are creating “web personalities” rather than “web sites”. I think you’re leading the way with the new site.
John,
Thanks for sharing your site and writing about the inspiration that lead to it. You have inspired me to do my own personal portfolio site aside from my company Miracle World Media Inc. I realize there is nothing wrong with promoting yourself.
Thanks man peace,