New Site is Up, Let’s See if it Actually Works

The new site is up and run­ning! This is the third iter­a­tion of this site ever since I bought the domain last sum­mer. Poritsky 3.0! Of the three sites that I’ve made in the past, this one stands out in many ways and I really con­sider it my first “pro­fes­sional” web­page. I relied on a few sim­ple crutches to get my page out the door. Don’t get me wrong, my old designs were won­der­ful for what they were, and they were extremely dif­fi­cult for me to build. This time around how­ever, I set some sim­ple rules for myself, cre­at­ing both obsta­cles and guide­lines within which I could cre­ate a site that made me as proud as I am right now. I’d like to share my think­ing with you now, if you’ve got the time to listen.

My first rule was that I would stop using iframes alto­gether on this new site. The iframe struc­ture that I have used in the past was great because it made it so that I could use the same header and footer for every page, while only chang­ing the info in between. In other words, once you loaded the site once, the only thing that would change would be the con­tent in the mid­dle of the page, where I put my reel, bio, resume, and any­thing else. The prob­lem with this was that cer­tain things would have to remain sep­a­rate from the main site com­pletely, namely my blog. There was sim­ply no com­fort­able blog­ging expe­ri­ence that could be achieved in the small space I allot­ted for my con­tent. As a workaround, I kept my blog com­pletely sep­a­rate from my main site, and found myself fool­ishly adver­tis­ing it at par­ties as “porit­sky dot come slash blog”. What a name, eh? Once blog­ging became my favorite part of run­ning my site, I knew that iframes, or frames of any sort, would not be allowed.

My sec­ond rule was related to col­ors. In the past, I have enjoyed com­ing up with fun color schemes for my web­site. For my first site, I took col­ors from some­thing impor­tant to me: film. Back in col­lege I went out of my way to shoot Fujifilm motion pic­ture stocks on my projects. This was a bit against the grain as our pro­fes­sors preached the won­der of Kodak over the years. I like both for dif­fer­ent rea­sons and when I bought this domain I thought it would be cool to inte­grate their coex­is­tence into my page, so I took Kodak yel­low and Fujifilm green and flanked my site with them. It worked, but it also looked a bit like sesame street. For Poritsky 2.0 I got rid of the green alto­gether and stuck to a lighter shade of yel­low with black serif text and a deep gray back­ground. Again, I was happy with it, but this time around I wanted to try and stay away from color for the most part. I felt that my old sites boxed vis­i­tors in with their color schemes, and really took away from the brows­ing expe­ri­ence. White was def­i­nitely the way to go this time around, because the inter­net just feels more open and expan­si­ble, which is a feel I want vis­i­tors to have.

Finally, it was incred­i­bly impor­tant that this site be a hub for all the things in my life that I want on the inter­net. Though I love to blog on Myspace and post pho­tos to Flickr, I really wanted this lit­tle slice of inter­net to be all me and all local. I didn’t want to link to my web foot­print from the page all the time, but rather I’d like my pres­ence to be unique to this site. So it was very impor­tant for me to be able to edit and manip­u­late pho­tog­ra­phy and blog­ging soft­ware on my site so that I could con­stantly update my con­tent. I don’t want to be held back by the visual lim­i­ta­tions of blogger.com or myspace or flickr for that mat­ter, but I want to be able to have as flex­i­ble an expe­ri­ence on my own page as I have on those alter­na­tives. I finally found ways to make that hap­pen, which was all the more rea­son to get this redesign finished.

Plus: No flash (what am I, a band?), Lightweight (quick down­load times!), and more PNGs (I <3 PNGs).

And Ideas For the Future: iPhone site, Internet Explorer com­pli­ant, and The Candler