About:

My portfolio site, intended to supplement my resume with the best of my digital projects! And, since this was a significant undertaking, I have included it here as a project I completed. This site was coded by myself entirely through HTML and CSS.

Development details:

Roles: Programmer, Designer
Languages: HTML, CSS
Tools: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Sublime Text, GitHub, GitHub pages, Gimp
Team size: 1
Development time: ~2 weeks
Developed: 2023

My role:

Programmer

• Programmed entirety of website
• Restructured old code for future maintainability and readability
• Published through GitHub pages
• Ensured proper responsive display on desktop and mobile devices
• Included accessibility features (image alt tags, WCAG color compliance)
• Implemented semantic, machine-parseable markup wherever possible
• Included search engine optimization (SEO) features
• Managed project through Git

Designer

• Focused on creating a simple user experience through information hierarchy, consistent visual language
• Conveyed growth, personality, and willingness to learn through content and design
• Laid out information so best projects presented first
• Redesigned for reusable, clean formatting

Lessons learned:

Research common development practices before getting started.

Before I got started, I researched practices for semantically-meaningful web design to create a quality page. Additional research into mobile-first design made for a site with even wider reach.

Personality is just as important as professionalism.

Without some personality, any presentation of information can prove uncompelling. I wanted to convey growth, willingness to learn, and my own personality while remaining professional. I also wanted to include some self-reflection through sections such as the "Lessons learned" block on each page (you're reading one right now!) since I believe this is one of my stronger traits! I also themed the header around brackets to allude to C/C++/C#/Java coding, which I am most familiar with!

Design for not just the present, but the future.

My previous portfolio website, developed in a rush, was inconsistently formatted, had a lot of issues. This attempt, I took extra time to incorporate what worked about the old one into the new design while spending a lot of time thinking about code structure and ease of reuse for the future; this portfolio should prove significantly more maintainable.

Links:

See the home page