Am I Boring?

I have been looking at lot recently at portfolio designs and ‘creative’ websites and wondered whether I should be trying to compete with them.

Compilations such as ’30 Fresh and Inspirational Portfolios With A Twist’ from Smashing Magazine are fantastic as portfolio pieces and happen to be portfolios which seems to be a perfect combination. They have great work and nice looking sites but it all depends what message you want to send.

This is what I am now thinking about. What message do I want to send?

Well…

• I want a job and want people to want to employ me. So I need to come across as professional.
• I want to be taken seriously as a designer so I need to show that there is a reason for the things I have done and show the thinking behind them.
• I want people to pay attention to the things I say so the content needs to be the priority.

So do I need a flashy website with bells and whistles? Not necessarily, I need to have a site that is accessible and looks professional, getting people to what they want to look at as quickly as possible. Sure there can be bells and whistles but so long as they add value to the user and are not just there for the sake of it.

In the design of my current site I knew I wanted certain things that would add value to the first impression of it as well as keep people coming back.

Things I added…

‘Read More’
This allows me to break the content into an introduction and only list that on the main page rather than the whole content as I had it before. It makes the most use of available space and shows more content for people to see if they want to read further. If they want to read more then they can, otherwise they just skip to the next post.

Recent Comments
Show other people’s views on my posts means that those posts are more likely to get attention from people who are either interested in the content or just wanting to see what all the fuss is about. I want to encourage discussions. If I have said something that is inaccurate, I want to find out why it is. Being proved wrong is just as valuable as being proved right.

Recent Tweets
Twitter has become huge and I have been using it for some time. I always wanted to find a way to integrate it into my site so that people who might not know about Twitter or who might not otherwise have seen my tweets, gets to see them. Instead of having one tweet at the top of the page I added the most recent three in the sidebar. With three tweets people can judge if they find them interesting, funny, useful etc and make a better judgement of whether they would like to follow me.

Recent accomplishments
Whether it is awards or podcasts, I think it is important to show what you are proud to have achieved recently.

More categories
Originally I only had four – Personal, Projects, News, General. I was using tags to describe various posts but while this is good practice it was actually rather stupid because the tags were listed at the bottom of the sidebar in a cloud. So more categories means a faster and easier way for people to go to what they’re interested in.

My External Links
YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter etc are all separate sites for a reason, they all provide different tools or features to people. I want someone to be able to get a good idea about me by looking at all the things I do so I include as many as possible. I have even included my Facebook but you will have to send a friend request to see anything. Each link says something about me as does the last time I used that site.

Links in the footer
This was more of an experience thing than anything else. When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you no longer have access to the menus that appear at the top without scrolling back up. Having the most used links at the bottom means that the experience doesn’t need to be interrupted by innate scrolling up to find a link. However if people do want to go back to the top I have included a ‘Back to top’ link that does just that. The active clicking of the link ensures that the experience continues quickly.

Recommended Posts and Natural Language
Linking directly to posts that relate to what has just been read is valuable because it shortens the time for people to navigate to other content they might like and also increases the likelihood of them staying on the site for longer. Using language like  “If you liked this you might also like…” rather than “Related Posts” is a much more human way of interacting a reduces the sharpness, again increasing the chances of further reading.

What all of this has led me to discover is that my site is perfect what what I am using it for. It is clear, professional and the content is the main point. It does what it needs to do and it does it well.

So do I want a flashy, all singing, all dancing website? No thanks, but I like to see what can be done. Does that make me boring? No, it makes me more creative ;)

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