Personal Websites: Keep it Simple.
My personal website has undergone many iterations, each iteration fueled by a new framework or technology that I just learned learned and was eager to try out.
The latest iteration happened when I discovered Propeller, a material design framework based on Bootstrap. Within hours of finding this new framework I decided I was going to update my site using it and went completely gun-ho. Four days later I was almost done and decided to post screenshots of my site on /r/design_critiques/. I was expecting raving comments on my work but all I got were comments like: “I get you’re using material design… But your portfolio looks like an app” and “My first impression was that I am looking at a material design template for a app dashboard”.
At first I was angry, “why do people not understand why I’m designing it this way?” I remember asking myself. I went back to gun-ho dev mode, reworking some elements of the site that I realized could use improvement. As I was reworking those elements I thought about the comments I read on my Reddit post when it hit me: I completely lost sight of what my site’s purpose is. So I went back to the drawing board and asked myself a two questions:
- What is the purpose of my site?
- What content and design should my site have to fulfill its purpose?
I have always tried to compete with online portfolio sites of web designers, and that’s where I think I went down the wrong path. I’m not a web designer, I’m a programmer. Not to say I couldn’t build a site that was of the same caliber as sites that belong to Web Designers, but that’s wasn’t my site’s purpose.
One of the reasons web designers have beautifully polished and complex sites is because their site is their resume, it gives their clients an idea of the level of work they are capable of. I’m not a web designer and my site’s purpose wasn’t to give users an idea of the work I do, it was simply a portal to connect users with the work that I do.
So with that in mind I set out on designing a new site, this time using a Minimum Viable Product approach. What would be the minimum viable site that I could create that met my requirements? As a result I went from a site that was >500 lines of code to one that now sits at barely 80 lines.
So what was the result of all this? My site still accomplishes it’s purpose and its still ascetically pleasing. It might not be as fancy as previous iterations but it accomplishes the most important goals that none of my previous sites managed to accomplish: staying simple, getting to the point, and getting the hell out of my way so I can focus what I do best.
You can check out my site here: golovine.org
