Website Redesign

I’d been wanting to give my site a makeover for months now; ever since switching to wordpress last summer, it was just in need of a better theme. It was annoying me how my portfolio was taking a back seat, even though my blog is important to me, you need your work to be right there when you click on, instead of having to click down about 3 layers.

After searching around for some good (free) templates on wordpress.org, I remembered Smashingmagazine.com sometimes give out free templates too, often with more of a portfolio slant in mind. I’m aware of the pitfalls of using a generic template (your website isn’t exactly unique) but to be honest, I’m not a web designer/coder; I just need a decent place to show off my work at it’s best, and also to encompass my blog too, because it’s an important part of what I offer (I freelance as a blogger too, you see.)

So I came across a couple, including these great ones by Marios Lublinski, which have a clean, swiss-feel about them. They are great but after installing and playing around, I realised they really were only for portfolio-only sites, not ones with a blog too. Disappointing, so my search continued. I then came across this one, by WPShower, called Sight. What I love about it is that the blog is still prominent, but the main feature is the Slideshow – where you can choose a few ‘featured’ posts to go up there. That works perfectly for me because I can feature my most recent work, then have the navi menu at the top to my different portfolio sections (which has been slimmed down considerably – so many sections before!), and then at the very top my about me and contact – which are kept separate but still in an easy to find place.

The one thing about this theme is that every post needs a featured image – which I’ve never bothered with before – but worth it in the long run because you can click the grid view button at the top of the posts and you can get this pleasing view of all the images:

Which is nice.

So what does everyone think? I’m really pleased – my work is easier to view and it seems to bridge the portolio/blog gap a lot better now. I’d like to have a crack at my logo (kind of threw it together), but that’s for another day. The only thing I have to contend with now is that my site still runs VERY slow sometimes – which is terrible for a portfolio site, obviously. I’m with Godaddy and I hear horror stories of them on WP – so am on the lookout to switch servers. How I do that, I have no idea. At all. Watch this space…