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New site is live!

Well, my new site design is almost done. On the to-do list:

• Finish Gallery/Portfolio – 50%
• Fix Search – 30%
• Twitter Integration – 0% (I may just skip this)
• Contact Page – 0%
• About Page – 0%

Stay tuned

Here’s an fantastic bulleted list of this weekend’s thoughts, points, events, etc

• Tapas 177 Lounge on St. Paul Street is fantastic
• 3 Martinis is 1 too many
• Blog portion of new site design is almost done
• I don’t like hearing about good people being laid off
• I want a new bicycle. Road, Hybrid-Road or Tri-Cross
• We have a delicious Key Lime Pie in our fridge. I give it 2 days
• As I type, I’m feeling today is going by very slowly – and that is awesome
• I cannot wait for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to come out in theaters
• August can’t come quick enough

That’s it! I hope your life is improved now that you’ve read that list. If not, I’ll try again soon!

I began working on a mock-up for a new site design this week. Unlike all other attempts, this attempt actually yielded something that has promise. It is very simple and clean with lots of white space around elements (mm…white space). I’m using the 960 Grid System as it makes mock-ups pretty easy for a beginner/novice such as myself.

I realize I should think a bit out of the box and not rely on a grid system for design, but I’m not terribly interested in creating overly flashy sites right now. Simple, minimal, clean, colorful is what I am after.

Thus far I’ve only created the homepage. I still need to work on the blog, single post (with comments), about me, contact and a portfolio. The portfolio will come later I feel as I want to invest a lot of time in making a great looking portfolio most likely with jQuery.

Beyond all the design stuff, which I’m loving, work has taken an interesting turn. I worry that it will put me back into a very undesirable mental state, but only time will tell.

Unfortunately, part of the turn is that I’ll no longer be working with a good friend and someone who’s experienced my career from the start. He essentially got me this job sans interview and for that, I’ll be extremely grateful to him. This will be the second time he helped me land a gig. The first was roughly 3 months after I graduated from college.

His presence on the team will be sorely missed as the three of us often find ourselves laughing uncontrollably as we take a joke beat it into the ground. We tend to shift from laughing aloud to mocking the person that eventually took the joke too far.

Seems I’m that person most times..and I’m totally fine with that, ha!

I almost offered up my time to do a bit of design work today but I didn’t. I feel as though I have more than enough to keep me busy and I shouldn’t feel that I “need” to help out if I really don’t have the time. I wouldn’t be fair to the other obligations I have, either.

Speaking of design work, I want to work on a redesign of this site from scratch (no pre-made themes this time). I’m much more confident in my skills in taking a design from mock-up to markup to theme. If you haven’t figured out from the current theme, I’m a big fan of minimal design. I really respect and appreciate all great design, but I have a fondness for clean, minimal stuff. Less is more.

There’s also my To-do list application (I’ll post a link soon, I promise!). It’s coming together, but it is by no means a pillar of excellent web development. The project was designed so I could get comfortable with jQuery, PHP and to get more comfortable with CSS (and possibly mess with CSS3)

Beyond the design stuff, there’s the personal. I’m trying to get some video game time in. I just bought Street Fighter IV and though I’m terrible at it, it’s lots of fun. I also bought Duma Key by Stephen King. As of right now, it’s a great read.

So really, I’ve got enough going on. I’ll end this now because I’m tired and my train of thought is completely derailed.