I finished up a freelance website a couple of weeks ago.  I made a custom WordPress template for the lovely ladies at Sky Candy.  Some of the good stuff with this template is the use of the Widget Logic plugin to allow them to target sidebar widgets to individual pages.  This lets them do things like add class info to their instructor pages.  Surprisingly, this just isn’t something that WordPress does out of the box.  Seems like a bit of no-brainer.

I tried to use the fancy new HTML5 tags as well.  <footer>, <header>, <section>, and all that.  It worked great in all the browsers on my Mac, of course.  But once I started checking in IE, nothing below IE9 knew what to do with them.  This is despite starting with the HTML5 Boilerplate.  I had to go through and replace all that stuff with <div>s before launching the site.

So, here it is.  Check out the live site.

Sky Candy Website

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been doing a web design job for a large corporation for about three years now.  I’ve been intending to make a grand web design portfolio for quite a while now.  I would occasionally research WordPress themes and gallery plugins to come up with the best possible backend for the maintenance of my impressive online professional presence.  I originally though this blog would be a portfolio, but it ended up being full of paintings of naked ladies and meditations on the value of drawing penises.

Tuesday night I got off work and spurred by the possibility of picking up some lucrative freelance work I finally made a portfolio page.  I was curious to see how quickly I could pull it off.  It took me about four hours to make the page I’m presenting to you.

I was going for a clean and minimal presentation.  I think it’s important when building an image gallery to let the design recede and for the images to be prominent.  You don’t want to overwhelm what you’re trying to present with excessive decorative elements.  To fancy it up a bit, I did a quick show/hide jQuery script for the project info and used the Fancybox plugin for the image expansion effect.  Both degrade gracefully, yay for progressive enhancement.

I found that I really don’t have a lot outside of my job stuff to show.  I’m hoping to fix that this year.  Time to embrace my inner nerd and do more freelance work outside of my nine to five.  I’m finding that I quite enjoy the web design stuff.  It’s a great mix of design and figuring stuff out.  I get a thrill of victory when I’ve been debugging a PHP script for an hour and a half and finally get the damn thing to work.  I beat the computer.  I win.

So without further ado, submitted for you approval, my new four hour web design portfolio.  Eventually it will all be integrated with this blog and perhaps an art gallery and a photo site.  If you’re my friend on Facebook you may have seen my recent spate of faux-arty digital photos being posted to Flickr.  For a new nerdy project I’m considering building a gallery for them and bring them in using the Flick API.  Basically I’ll be using Flickr as a CMS.  But, we’ll see.  It took me a long time to get around to making the simple portfolio page, so something just for fun like a photo gallery can be put off indefinitely.