I’ve been working on portfolio designs for the last month. I had a cool tea box that I was using as inspiration but I just couldn’t get the right look, despite cooking up 7 different versions. You can see the best of this terrible bunch on the left. I really liked the colours and the swirly pattern on the box, I just couldn’t get this to translate into a design. Such is life.
Anyway, instead of the tea box design, I went for something really simple but with a really complex pattern for the banner. It’s probably better to have a simple design for a portfolio anyway.
I wasn’t sure whether to use my existing code or switch to WordPress at this point, so I made the design able to cope with both eventualities. Mostly this was because I planned on adding some examples of my written work to my portfolio and I wasn’t sure how well static pages would cope with that, and I wasn’t sure how I’d store all the content in a database without making my own CMS (though I’ve probably over complicated the solution in my mind).
I’ve started working with my existing portfolio – PHP based with an SQL database. I think I’ve been using it since version 7 (before this I used HTML) in 2008. The code was terrible, so I’m taking the time to redo everything, doing my best to follow best practice (from what my Google searches could tell me).
I am really proud of what I’ve made so far. I can pull the images and their descriptions from the database, and everything is styled nicely. It might be simple, but I’m pleased with my progress. Now I just need to work on pulling images based on their categories (I think there are too many thumbnails on the page at the moment), and work out what I’m doing with the written work.