Disco Liam

Look Mum. I made’d a website, all by myself!

Yeap. That’s right. My new website is now live, as I’m sure you can tell. Its not finished. In fact, its barley even started, but I needed to get the ball rolling before I finally leave Beef and head of for a summer of fun all over the country.

The site is now all powered by Wordpress. It was my first attempt at really playing around with it, and I’m starting to see the potential it has. I’ve really enjoyed working with it thus far, and I’m looking forward to getting a bit more involved with it soon.

For the custom theme, I used Elliot Jay Stocks ‘Starkers’ as a blank template. This made everything a lot easier as I didn’t have to battle any existing CSS, I could stat how I wanted from scratch. From their I built the prototype, which just had all the content and no styling at all. Once I was happy that was all working I moved on to the style sheets. So far the site only uses one image (the background) and this silly text background which I’m fairly sure makes most of it un-redable. But I quite like the half made feel to it.

The long term plan seems to be growing daily, but the first thing I’m going to do is get back to the drawing board and tidy up the design somewhat. There are a lot of aspects I didn’t consider until I was styling, so made most decisions on the fly. I’m not to happy with most of the details on pages, I need to find a way of working with full blocks of text that sticks to the original concept, as what I initially hoped to achieve wont be possible. There are other areas like comments and sidebars I though nothing of until I got to the development stage. A week in photoshop should be able to tidy up most of these issues, which is a prefect plan for any rainy days we have this summer.

Its looking a little bit bare at the moment content wise. Mostly as I haven’t written it all yet. Over the next two weeks my rough plan of action is to get my basic portfolio in, sort out homepage links, add twitter/last.fm info to the sidebar, set up the contact forms, and generally polish it enough to advertise myself as a freelance web developer.

I think that’s enough for now. Let me know what you think so far. Do you love it, do you hate it?