Welcome to the new creativefriday.com. This site was a challenge for me because it was so personal. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression and that’s as true as anything I’ve ever heard. I knew that I had to make a statement. But I lost my focus and I was abandoning my own method for creating meaningful user experiences. My goals fluctuated and my designs ranged from energetic to intricate to simple. I wasn’t starting from the very beginning and that lead to failure after failure. During this time I was working for clients and choosing to be very methodical for them. Why I wasn’t doing this for myself is a mystery to me. Thankfully something snapped and I realized that I needed to treat my site as I would any client’s. I needed to identify my audience and understand my requirements. This site design and layout were carefully thought out to provide the simplest user experience possible.

The Requirements

The most important requirement for me was getting my portfolio online. Many of the clients I’ve done work for the past few months have been through word of mouth. That’s probably the best way to get a client because you’re already starting out with a recommendation by the person who told the client about you in the first place. But for all of those freelance and consulting positions I was seeing online I knew I had to have a professional looking site and portfolio before they would even consider talking to me.

I wanted a site that was more dynamic than the sites I’ve had in the past. Not just a blog but other information streaming in as well. I wanted to try and show the whole picture of who I am. If a person reads my blog, sees the kinds of articles I’m reading, and follows me on social sites then they are going to get a much better understanding about the kind of person I am and what really drives me in web design. This overall picture was important to me.

And on the list of “wants” was to use some javascript to give the site some interactive appeal. I’m not trying to make my site “sticky” or anything like that. I just wanted to be able to provide an interesting way to view my information without forcing the user to click through a complex navigation scheme. Javascript would allow me to provide a much more simple user interface.

My Audience

According to Google Analytics, I don’t have an audience. I suppose that’s to be expected when my focus hasn’t been very clear. So I had to put some thought into this. I couldn’t try and create a site for the audience I wanted to have but for the audience I was probably going to have. When I looked at my site from a visitor’s perspective I could see only one of two reasons a person would visit creativefriday.com; 1) they were here to read an article I wrote or 2) they were a potential client here to review my portfolio. Everything else would have to be secondary.

The Complex Simple Solution

I read such a great article by John Gruber titled Ronco Spray-On Usability a few months ago. If you haven’t read it I would highly recommend it, especially if you find it difficult to understand why the world needs usability experts. But the gist of it, the essence of the article, is that simple is difficult to achieve. When you nail simple and you got it right, most people don’t even notice because it’s simple and easy to use and gets out of their way. It’s kind of a thankless task. Get it wrong and people hate you, get it right and no one notices.

When I first started thinking about my requirements and my audience I had come up with a fairly simple navigation scheme; Home, Blog, Portfolio, Social, and About Me. When I looked at that solution it seemed like it would probably work. Especially since that’s a common theme throughout the web. But as I was creating my site map and then the wireframe I started to see that there was a problem. There were just too many clicks for a person that was here to either read a blog post or view my portfolio. Those other tabs would likely fall into the ether never to be heard from again. The answer had to be simpler. But when I set up the very simple navigation Blog and Portfolio, I thought that some of my requirements were going to get lost. And then I looked at jQuery for a client project and while working on their site realized that this could be the answer for my site. Once I got the expandable footer element working with jQuery I knew I had solved the problem.

An Agile Approach, A Work in Progress

This site is meeting all of my needs right now, as it is. But I do have additional elements I would like to add. Without the need to make any changes to the main navigation I am going to add a “Hire Me” page with my schedule and a form. I would also like to create a breadcrumb at the top of each page. Search isn’t here now because there’s barely any content to search for but I would like to add search and a search results page. These things can all be built later using the Agile Software Development approach. The site was structured in a way that would allow me to add the necessary pieces later without altering the look and feel of what you see today.

All in all, I’m very happy with the end result. At least for now anyway.