Since my website (aka my web class‘s final project) is finally up (aka due), here’s how I’ve tried to direct traffic there. 

I’ve added it as my website on Facebook, MySpace (even though my last update there was in 2005), and YouTube. I also added a link to my website to my signature on my gmail and American e-mail accounts.

Meanwhile, I revisited the personal portfolio of Cara Williams, and commented one of her blog posts saying how amazing her site it.  It really is. I had linked to her site before as an example of inspirational design, and I still think it is.  The site has a lot going on, but it’s well organized and very informational. I’d like to be able to make something as polished as that and hope to learn from the online community of web developers like her. (Last I checked, the comment wasn’t showing up on her regular site, but was on the blogger feed.)

I found them all through wordpress.org, but some had their own external sites as well. The first is a shadowbox flickr photo album made by tantannoodle. Wish I was making that up, but I’m not. I liked the simplicity of its thumbnail display (although I’d like to increase the white space between the thumbs), which I hope to emulate manually with thumbnails of my videos, only those will link to…

YouTube videos embedded with Viper’s Video Quicktags. This makes the look of the videos a little more customizable, but mainly makes them simpler to embed behind the scenes.

And finally, for no good reason other than to reflect my pervasive lack of a stable address, I used a contact form called cformsII, which seems to have been developed by a chef. Here, too, I liked that the contact form could take on the very clean, minimalistic look that I want to pervade my site.

I think you should watch the Crazy Indian Video Buffalaxed on my YouTube favorites.

This has been another helpful homework assignment for Dynamic Web.

Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley

I LOVE the typography on this site.  I want to use a similar serif font for my headlines, and selectively use their techniques of wide spacing+forced line breaks+forced justify to format some of the subheads in my navigation. 
I think my column sizes will be similar to this site.   

Agenturblog

This blog, entirely in German, uses my exact color palette. Besides for that, it doesn’t use much design; while that may be a design choice in itself–and I like the striking simplicity of it–I don’t intend to emulate its sparsity, at least not to the same degree.

Afasici Papuasia

This one it a bit plain in terms of color use, but I love its use of positive and negative space.  I want to use white throughout my site to draw on the negative space like this one does.

Pop Culture Tees

I really like the graphic at the top of this page, and the way it meshes into the white space below.  I make a similar graphic for the top of my site, but something less grungy and less done. While it will use a pink base color, with some white stamping on it and it will frame a white content area, I’ll use a lighter pink, my own hodgepodge of cultural designs, and wrap it more around the left and right.  

I’ll make the shell of my site in Photoshop, scanning some textures/designs, and creating others in Photoshop/Ilustrator.  Since I’m not going for a super collage-y look, I’ll depend mostly on Photoshop effects rather than scanned items for any depth I give to my graphical elements–drop shadows, highlights, etc.  Outside of the main header and background images, I hope to do the rest of the formatting, especially the font formatting, with CSS.

Centered layout. Rationale: with high res but varied screen sizes, centered layouts guarantee equal empty space on both sides, pulling the viewer into the content.

Fixed layout size (around 950 px?), based on common convention and convenience for designing. Also, since I do want it to be design oriented, as a personal portfolio, I’m concerned more with it looking good than adapting to user preferences.

I think I’ll lean toward a high ratio of content-to-navigation, since my site won’t be so big that it needs extensive navigation. Also, being a portfolio, I really want the content to pop. I might aim for a .66 ratio, in keeping with the rule of thirds.

Of course, I’ll use CSS in favor of tables, because CSS is the best!

Like 98% of everyone else, I’ll conform to the convention of dark text on a light background. Let’s face it, not even hip kids can take too much light-on-dark. It’s just not friendly to the eyes.

I’d been envisioning a horizontal nav bar at the top of the page, maybe with a secondary one on the left. But after reading the Smashing article, I’ve been converted to the idea of right hand navigation. Plus, the limited content has me rethinking the need for primary/secondary navigation at all.

For my personal portfolio, I don’t anticipate updating the blog portion all that often, although I do anticipate the posts being fairly substantial when I do. So, I think five posts (or teasers thereof) would be plenty to relay the important information. For older posts, viewers can just click on the “blog” or “more posts” links.

For a portfolio site, I don’t want the search box to be overly prominent. Again, the site isn’t so extensive that viewers should have to use the search box to find what they’re looking for. With that in mind, I would place the search box either at the bottom of the vertical nav bar or in the footer.

Finally, here are some pretty sweet themes that more or less fit what I’m looking to do: Aspire, Gridline Lite, Fluid Yellow Black, and Mini.

One day soon, you’ll be able to see something like these, but better, on http://katie-garcia.wordpress.com. And maybe someday after that, just www.katie-garcia.com.

Skotopoi

The half-blog half-portfolio of my brother, Chris, which he also made with WordPress. It mainly showcases his artwork via blog entries; the format of the site makes it more blog-ish (for friends to follow him) than portfolio-ish (for employers to scout him). There are some comments, mostly from a small band of friends and loyal followers.  There are categories–two, and they are applied lazily.  There are also tags, also sporadically.  Updates are about monthly. There aren’t ads.

Cara Williams

This portfolio I just stumbled on, thank to Google. Thanks, Google!  It’s for a web designer who looks pretty funky.  It’s an interesting combination of professional and personal, ultimately landing a bit on the side of tmi to snag stuffy big businesses, but it absolutely convinces me that Cara Williams has a really fun aesthetic and some impressive web skills. The blog actually comes from Blogger, and she updates it every few months; she doesn’t seem to use tags, but does comments and categories. There aren’t ads.

Jeff Sarmiento

Another web designer, this one a bit more high profile–but whose site is also “powered by WordPress”. I noticed that web designers seemed most likely to have blogs, Tweets, and other geeky clutter on their sites, while other artists seemed more likely to have very sleek sites that require minimal maintenance. Jeff seems not to employ categories or tags, but he updates a few times a month and his blog posts command many more comments than Cara or Chris’s.  He also doesn’t have ads on his site.

p.s. Hi Brad!