New Site!

Posted On: 2016-09-10

By Mark

I've been working on-and-off on a new site for a while, and I've finally got it to a point where I want to share it. As with everything I do, I'd like to enumerate the design goals of the new site:

It should provide an online space to support

• Sharing prototypes and small projects that I have created that I think would interest others
• Sharing thoughts that might be useful to others (probably design related)
• Transitioning away from prototypes to work on larger scale projects
• Providing regular updates for those that might be interested in what I am working on
• Providing a backend for prototypes that require one (might be temporary)

After enumerating these goals it is now clear (for me at least) why the project took so long- a number of the goals are completely unrelated, and therefore increased the scope of what was required before I felt comfortable releasing it. In hindsight, it would have been faster and more effective to pick one or two of these to focus on and release, and then build out the other, unrelated functionality over time. Unfortunately, I did not enumerate this list until far too late, and therefore had already invested significant time across multiple goals.

While you can easily poke around on the new site yourself, I wanted to draw attention to two features that I am pretty excited about:

• Prototypes are grouped together in one place, and feature visual indicators of what technology they require.
• Blog posts (like this one) are simple to write maintain using a nice, human-readable format.

I spent a decent chunk of time on each of them, in the hopes that it would save me time maintaining them going forward (and keep them consistently looking nice!) I'd love to hear any thoughts about the new site design, so please send them my way!