After completing my Spring 2013 redevelopment of ClarkAndCathy.net (which included a code-consolidation effort that touched on ClarkRasmussen.com), I was able to move on to a redesign of my personal site.
I realized it had been five years since the last time I had done the design on ClarkRasmussen.com so I wanted to take the time to give it a bit of a facelift. The content was all still (mostly) good and with the admin tools having been offloaded to ClarkAndCathy.net, it should have just been a simple redesign of the template. I had to get difficult, though, and add a blog into the mix, as I wanted to add a place where I could write about things other than hockey, for which I already had DetroitHockey.Net.
The design started off with a new logo. I didn’t like that I had been stuck with a simple text treatment as the header of my previous design so I went back to the idea I had when I first created the site in 2003, my initials in an oval. This time, rather than oversizing and skewing the oval, I kept it smaller, almost a background element to the initials. I also kept it monochrome so it could be used in multiple environments.
With the logo done, I moved on to the page template. I kept the basic elements of the existing site but changed each up a little bit. The header remained blue but rather than having a striped texture it had a simple gradient. The new logo was placed in the middle of this bar, with the gradient applied to it as well. The navigation bar was kept gray with white text but was made larger, with a similar gradient applied to it. Links to ways to connect with me via social media were added to the right side of the bar, represented by a white version of each service’s logo. The footer was simply white text on a gray background.
The blog became difficult because I wanted to use the same WordPress installation as was used by the blog on ClarkAndCathy.net. I ended up having to map my blog subdomain onto the existing blog installation and hack the WordPress code a little bit to get it to understand which blog requests to that subdomain were meant for.
With the blog working, I redesigned the content of the ClarkRasmussen.com home to feature a blog excerpt and a pair of my recent Tweets. A paragraph of welcome text and links to my other projects were retained from the previous design.
The above text and images were copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing.