A new website…
After almost three years of being self employed and grafting hard at the coal face, I thought it was about time to practice what I preach and update my own website. I find self promotion really hard so I’ve been lucky to get most of my work through referrals and contacts of my own since starting off. Although its kept me busy, it has meant that I haven’t had the time to show anything off in my portfolio and I’ve also found myself thinking about how my work might be perceived in the big wide world, having it looked at by my peers and examined by other creatives… A new years resolution was to take time to build my site and start to promote myself better… so here it is.
As I build a lot of websites for clients in Squarespace (Gillibrands and Bowland Bikes included) I thought it would be best to use it for myself and have a play with the new 7.1 version. The responsive nature of Squarespace lends itself really well to designing a portfolio site efficiently and allows for great cross device consistency, which is important in this current age where recent data is suggesting nearly 70% of web traffic is now on a mobile device. After a few days digging into the new features of 7.1 and experimenting with how things could be done I got stuck in and started customising.
Having worked at Fat Media with some great developers, I won’t start to pretend that full-on coding is my thing, but working in Squarespace and doing custom CSS tweaks to help with the bespoke design is something I’m really enjoying doing. With built in analytics, email marketing tools and a user friendly CMS, Squarespace is great for me to offer to clients who might find traditional CMS websites a bit daunting. The shift in weight from needing a bespoke web build can also help with budgets to allow money to be used for branding, photography or other supporting brand assets which can be used in other promotional materials.
Having also designed numerous bespoke Wordpress websites for clients in the last two and a half years, including full UI and UX design projects, whilst understanding the amount of work that goes into planning and building them, the thought of doing a website like that for myself was not going to happen… I also have the luxury to make design changes myself (change all the typography to be comic-sans) without having to annoy someone else…
With that in mind, please have a look around and let me know what you think. If you’d like to chat about a project, be it a Squarespace website, a Wordpress website or anything at else at all, please get in touch using the details below.
