The Site You’re Viewing Now

 

developer portfolio theme thumbnail

The site you’re viewing right now is a custom coded WordPress theme I made for myself.  Pictured is a previous version/design that I had made, and have since updated.  My goal for this theme was to make a site that would showcase my other projects and make it easy for potential employers to evaluate my skill level and experience.  I chose to go with WordPress partly because I wanted it to be easy to update the site by adding new projects, but mostly because I really like WordPress and wanted more experience building custom themes.  To make this site, I used:

  • PHP
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • jQuery
  • Sass
  • WordPress (custom theme)
  • Bootstrap

It features a landing page and multiple other page templates, including the Blog (which is currently being updated and will return soon!) and Portfolio Project pages (like the one you’re viewing now!), which display different types of posts. The most fun part about this project was also the most challenging part: I wanted to keep the design simple so I could do it myself (design is not my passion or forte…), but I also wanted it to reflect my personality to the viewer so that it would stand out from the myriad of “stock photo and skill bar” type portfolios an HR manager is apt to get.

The awesome/terrible part about working on your own site is that it becomes an endlessly-improving, never fully completely, always-gonna-be-tweaking-it, work in progress. I’m  still working on it, and probably will continue to for years to come!

But it does what I need it it do:  Functionally, I needed it to display my projects, but in keeping with my writing hobby, I decided to also add a blog to it so I could share things I uncover in the never-ending quest to learn more about programming and web development.  Soon after I started the blog, I had an opportunity to share my post with a developer group I’m a part of, and I was glad I had decided to add that feature.  Sharing information and helping each other learn is such an important part of giving back to the very supportive developer community, it’s nice to be a part of that!