Brand New Website

08 Feb 2012 by Nigel Sampson

So the blog here has been a little quiet over the last month and now I can reveal why. For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new version of my website. Normally it wouldn’t take this long for me but I gave myself a few challenges on the way.

The first being the design itself, wanting to do a bit more of a “Metro” style design left me actually designing the site myself, not something I’m particularly comfortable with but I think it came out ok but I don’t think I’ll be offering design services any time soon. The second was a chance to look at Entity Framework Code First, I initially spiked a version that used RavenDB but found deployment to my shared host was problematic, it’s a shame since it’s a great project to work with.

For a lot of my professional career I’ve been a web developer but for last eighteen months or so I’ve been doing more backend or xaml based work so haven’t really done much with HTML5, CSS3. There’s been a lot of new things new to this area in the last year including responsive design, mobile, languages such as SASS and CoffeeScript. It’s amazing how fast this industry moves and how quickly it feels like your skillset is out of date. Hopefully I can find the time to revisit this website project a bit more often and evolve the entire project.

Some other fun things including on the way was using the fantastic Web Workbench product from Mindscape here in New Zealand to create the .LESS stylesheets. Having variables for things like accent colour made everything a lot easier.

As with all software projects this will be an ongoing thing as there’s still a lot I want to do, these include:

• Cleaning up the markup to be more semantic and improve the use of the new HTML 5 tags.
• Move to a responsive grid to help the website work on mobile devices.
• Social Sharing via Facebook and Twitter.
• As always the code can be cleaned up.
• Metro Tutorials
• MetaWeblog API so I can use Markpad as an editor.

Hope you like the new website; I’ve got lots of plans for it for the year and would love your feedback.