After years of having the same website design, I decided it was time for a complete redesign from the ground up. In the years since I first built my website and portfolio, I have turned from purely a photographer to working on films and as a designer as well. With my new website I wanted to better showcase the different work I have done and continue to do as a designer, photographer, and filmmaker.

Design

My inspiration for the new design of my website came from magazines and print. I wanted to create something that was simple and showed my work first and foremost. I also wanted all pages to be visually tied together and for the blog posts to look more like a print publication.

I also designed specific views for mobile and tablet, as well as desktop, creating a modern website that would responsively scale on all devices.

Development

I have used WordPress as my CMS of choice for over five years and I know it inside and out. Though I had done some customization on my earlier websites, I had never created a WordPress theme from scratch. I knew it would be a challenge (having never coded in PHP before) but I knew I was up to the task.

I began the development of my new site by creating a local server using Mamp and installing an instance of WordPress on it.

The base of the site was built using PHP and HTML. I used JavaScript and jQuery to create animations and run a few plugins such as slider, and a masonry grid for the portfolio.

I styled the site with Sass which was a huge improvement in time and organization over simple CSS.

Finalizing the Site

After testing the site on my local server, I uploaded the completed theme to my live server and there I had it: a brand new design. I learned a huge amount about website development in this process. As well as giving me more experience in development, it has also given me greater context into what designs work best for web.