A new site in 24 hours
Well the 24 hour redesign challenge that I issued myself is now over. Literally minutes ago, i closed my text editor and ftp app and let the dust settle. I thought now might be a suitable time to jot down some initial thoughts on how it all went.
Overall it was a lot of work, but not as hard as I had thought. Of the 24 hour period i spent just under 16 of it actively working on the site (with a few hours for sleep, food etc) which is not too bad an effort for coding up a site (and making a bunch of design decisions on the fly) from scratch.
The most time consuming part was actually working within wordpress to set up the structure for my portfolio posts, and then getting them to output correctly in the templates. The styling of everything worked pretty well, with only a couple of little responsive-related tricky spots.
What’s notable
There’s a few things i am particularly proud of - particularly the fact that the whole is responsive (well mostly, see below) and is visually optimised for most devices. I’ve taken advantage of some webkit animations for hover effects in the menu, and around the place which i think are pretty nice. You’ll need to view the site in safari or chrome to get the full effect.
I’m a fan of the portfolio section - it’s nice and simple but shows of the sites I have built with big images.
So what is missing?
The nature of the time constraints was that I couldn’t get everything done that I want to. Some notable elements missing are the current lack of a print stylesheet, and an overall lack of content. As you can imagine, the current state of the site is not completion - it’s just an interesting resting point. I’m going to continue tying up loose ends and tidying things up in the coming days.
Overall I would call the challenge a success. At the end of the day I have a brand new site I am proud of. I pushed myself, and feel a benefited from it.