With the new year now into full swing, I’m happy to introduce some tweaks to mikeprecious.com. I eagerly worked over the month of December like a busy elf, trying out some new ideas to further build on the existing design platform. The original iteration of the site came in the Winter of 2008 and has, like most sites out there, undergone tweaks, nudges and modifications as new content was posted and more traffic arrived at the site. Fortunately, the site was logistically designed from day-one to be relatively versatile to updates.
One day I may take a new direction in the design and heavily layer the design. For now though, I’ve found value in presenting a site which takes a step back and puts the [portfolio] work front-and-center. There are plenty of top gun designer self promotion sites I come across daily. Many are absolutely stunning, and employ new, never-seen-before navigation and preview options. A common caveat I discover however, is the designer will often have this beautiful self promo site design, but when reviewing the work quality in their portfolio, it falls short of the promise seen in their self promo site design. While I completely understand many new-to-the-field designers want to show off their talents via their self promo site, it can sometimes be a bit of a disappointment if their portfolio does not meet the same level of quality. The route I took was starting with a very stripped down self promo site, and presenting my best portfolio work front-and-center. I brought upwards of a decade of experience with me freelance and employed [when officially opening the "doors" to my business]. So loading up the online portfolio wasn’t a grave concern. If you’re a new designer, why not create some web or print mock-ups? While there’s no substitute for the value of paid client projects in the portfolio, mock-ups can show prospects what you’re capable of doing. As long as you’re clear with inquiring prospects about the mock-ups, and transparent about being new to the field, clients will evaluate your potential and compatibility to their project accordingly.
Sorry for rambling off. Back to point!
Looking at a few of the tweaks to mikeprecious.com: To put the work front-and-center, a home page banner area was created where new work could be showcased and changed-up constantly. The home page banner area detects user visitation cache to the site and presents a new banner each time they “refresh” the home page, or return to the home page from an interior page. This helps to create constant exposure of a breadth and depth of work. In the Work section, the idea was to make the navigation as simple as possible, and the work samples as large as possible. Keeping the site fundamentally simple was important in allowing the client work to become the visual focal point.
With the new site tweaks, there is slightly more fabrication to the site. More graphical content, wider layout, and new background texture among some of the tweaks.
As a student to new ideas and progress, I eagerly look forward to the year ahead. Thanks for dropping by. Have a look around and let me know what you think.
mikep
Noel Hurtley
January 5th, 2009
Looks awesome Mike! I love it.
The only thing I would suggest is adding
outline:0;to form fields in the stylesheet to remove the ugly blue outline that Safari uses to indicate the currently selected field.Cheers!
Lukas Bugla
January 5th, 2009
Well done! I like the new “Bloglines” feature on the top.
josh
January 5th, 2009
niceness! I think your primary nav might be screwy. “Contact” works fine and dandy but can’t seem to click the others (Work, Testimonials About and Blog)
If it helps I’m running latest version of Safari.
great work though
Mike Precious
January 5th, 2009
Hi Josh,
thanks for letting me know. Could you let me know if you’re still having trouble navigating to the other pages?
Mike
josh
January 5th, 2009
All set.
When I initially visited your site after the redesign the primary nav was located above the logo, i just cleared my cache and they are now correctly seated below the logo and clickable. It could have been some cached code from the previous site maybe?
Mike Precious
January 5th, 2009
Your browser could very well have cached some data during the turnover to the new site. I appreciate the input. Thanks again.
Blake Allen
January 7th, 2009
As always, love your design.
Brandon
January 8th, 2009
Hi Mike,
The site looks stunning in a modern web browser but looks awful when viewed in IE6 (a.k.a. the site destroyer), particularly because your PNG’s don’t render out their transparency.
Did you make a decision to not support IE6? The company I work for is about to launch the next version of our site and we are currently deciding whether or not to hack it to pieces to get it looking decent in IE6 or to leave our code as is and forget about IE6 altogether.
On one hand I would love to raise a proverbial middle finger to IE6. On the other hand, IE6 still accounts for 20% of the market.
What are your thoughts?
Mike Precious
January 8th, 2009
Hi Brandon,
when I created my new site design, I thought of who my intended target audience was: affluent web development studios, design studios, and ad agencies. All aforementioned parties would indefinitely be utilizing the latest technology on all fronts - including their web browsers. There are some extremely discerning individuals who still believe every site must be designed for every browser version. That belief would definitely ring true if a site for say, Wal-Mart, Visa, or eBay was being considered. They must appeal to a broad audience.
My site follows W3C standards compliancy parameters, and of course, will work in Firefox, Safari, and IE v7 just fine. I decided to go the route of PNG-24s for some of my images because of the capability of the new browsers. The bottom line is, I hung my hat on expecting affluent users using newer browsers to land on my site. If I were targeting say, local business owners who had never had a web presence and were looking to hire someone to build their first site, there would then certainly be a conflict - because those users could very likely be using IE v6.
In your situation I would definitely take a good look at the intended target audience of the site, determine who will be visiting it, and execute accordingly.
Thanks for getting in touch!
Mike
Justin
January 14th, 2009
Nice redesign! Really like that background texture, and the portfolio is looking great
I allowed for a couple shortcomings in IE6 when I redesigned my site nearly 2 years ago, based on similar rationale - I made the site to get a job, so I figured my primary audience wouldn’t likely be using that browser. In the end, I did an interview over the phone where the interviewer was using IE6 in a conference room so I was glad my site didn’t blow up completely.
E. Seagrave
January 15th, 2009
I am so jealous. You are awesome. Love all the subtle touches, the gradients, shadows, and glows. Killer.
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