Developing a Personal Website — Part 2: Inspiration
In part 1, I defined my aim in creating the website, and a general outline of my plan. Now I want to have a look around and see what other people have done for their personal websites. I’m primarily looking for two things
- Scope of the site — What sort of content are people showing on their sites?
- Design — Are there any design features I particularly like, or dislike?
Scouting the competition
http://www.madebydaryl.co.uk/
I really like the animations of the project icons as you scroll up and down the page. It gives the page a dynamic feel, and looks really polished.
http://www.albinotonnina.com/
Essentially an animated resume. Really shows off the creators skills. Visually awesome. I’m not sure if I could pull off something similar, as it would demand quite strong design skills. I’m not sure if that sort of thing is something I want to invest time in at this stage.
http://joshuamccartney.com/breakingbad
The thing that stands out with this site is the simplicity. Sometimes a simple site can do the job. I’m very aware of the possibility of overcomplicating my site. This will be a trade-off because a super simple site wouldn’t challenge me from a development sense, but I still want an effective website.
http://tanmade.com/making/mnemosyne.html
I really like the header bar on this site. It really increases the scope of the site and allows Tan to incorporate a wide variety of content. It also makes the site a lot more conversational, and gives me an insight into his personality. I think I’ll tuck that one away.
http://deda.me/
Very well designed, and I love the interactive graphics at the top. However, I’m not sure it translates so well on mobile
http://drewwilson.com/
Very simple and professional. I like that it is clearly a mobile-first design.
Running Thoughts
Having looked few quite a lot of sites, I think I’m comfortable in creating a site that contains all my content, as opposed to a mere portfolio site.
In terms of design, a couple of areas stood out. A lot of personal websites will say something like ‘Fraser McIntosh: Developer, Blogger. Creating Stuff.’ or some similar tagline. I find these to be really pretentious but I couldn’t think how to avoid using it in my site. After all it is important for people to know what I am about. However I really liked Tan’s approach to this, and think I will incorporate this into my site.
I like the idea of having selected projects/blogs/whatever being displayed as the user scrolls down the main page. Possibly I can have an about section below that.
Next up, I’m going to start sketching up some layout ideas! I’m looking forward to getting closer to actually starting to code this thing.
P.S.
I like this site a lot http://www.ashleyfarrand.com/