Behind the Scenes: This Site
When I was creating my resume for this class, I always had the intention of making my personal site more design-focused. To be honest, designing a static site like this is fairly simple and purely front-end, which meansthere's little to no backend code to handle things like user input, server data, and other dynamic features. This is a large reason why I decided to focus my effort on the visual design and making the site user-friendly. I wanted to make sure this site showed my personality and visual aesthetic, in addition to the content that's required by the assignment guidelines. This was to contrast my resume, which is very minimal and purely content-focused.
I coded this site from scratch, meaning there were no editors involved and I wrote all the code in plain files. Not only was this so I could have full control over the visuals, but to show my skills in design and web development. Creating websites isn't something I plan to have as my fulltime job, but I love to create browser-based games and communities, so showing I can do those things felt essential to taking advantage of all the opportunities this assignment provided. The work put into this site was evenly split between HTML and CSS - and for those who don't know what that means: HTML is the actual content of the site, such as this paragraph and the containers I created to organize the pages. CSS is a script that works alongside HTML to style the content, such as adding the borders to this container and making the buttons react when you hover over them! You can see some screenshots that show examples of this content down in the gallery of this page!
Anyway, I put quite a lot of work into this site, and I'm really pleased with the results. I didn't necessarily do a ton of new things here, but I did learn how to create a few new features I've never tried before. I also really think it's worth the time to look at the work that goes into a site even as simple as this one. Most people don't realize how much work goes into the majority of the content they consume through technology, and websites are no different. Understandably, most people tend to assume every makes their websites in editors such as Wix, and although that's pretty common for personal sites and small businesses, that's often not the case elsewhere.